Reds! Official Fanfiction Thread (Part Two)

I take it you have not seen the movie Man with a Moving Camera aka Man with a Movie Camera? It's a very avante garde arty film made in the late 1920s in the late NEP period, and scenes of naked people in the mud of some Crimean beach or riverside resort are included, along with a very explicit shot of a woman giving birth.

No, Stalin did not like it, nor the higher Bolsheviks in charge of culture in the '20s. But it was allowed to be filmed!

And since Soviet Russia is going to be more...Americanized, I figured that the Soviets will be open to more silly festivals.
 
The 1920s are a far outlier when it comes to the Soviet sexual mores. OTL, not even the Khrushchev's thaw (when the ban on abortions was lifted and divorce simplified) brought them back completely.
 
The 1920s are a far outlier when it comes to the Soviet sexual mores. OTL, not even the Khrushchev's thaw (when the ban on abortions was lifted and divorce simplified) brought them back completely.
Sure, I expect post-Stalinist Soviet Union to remain more traditionally patriarchal, complete with a freight of mass hypocrisy we can call "Victorian,"prudish," "traditional values" or what have you--nothing perpetuates what these people denounce as sin and indecency quite so much as prudishness combined with inconsistent enforcement, and consistent enforcement quickly becomes mass tyranny, and pretty much guarantees corruption. We have plenty grounds to suppose such prudishness remains a major bit of Soviet identity versus American libertinism.

Pretty sad from a libertine point of view.

I have been left to speculate on the meaning of the inclusion of the naked people covered in mud scenes in Man With the Moving Camera; my impression is it would not have been controversial in Russia, being a normal thing better off people did before the Revolution, the point of including it being merely that now working proletarians too could enjoy the culture formerly reserved for their betters who had leisure time and money to enjoy something approved in principle for real people who weren't too poor to enjoy a fully human life. Elitist culture naturally assumes a large segment of humanity is subhuman, but I doubt the mud bathing was considered an example of being "not cultured," the worst insult in Russian. The mud bathing for the masses is a step up in Russian eyes, as I hypothesize. Probably it's at least fun.

But what do I know? A little bit, not nearly as much as I would like!

Stalin did not disapprove the movie for reasons of sexual prudery. It was too libertine-democratic across the board, too "bourgeois-degenerate" as the Bolshevik cultural arbiters disapproved the whole 1920s Soviet avante-garde scene. These avante-garde types nevertheless were tolerated in the NEP period. Just not approved as proper proletarian culture. (In fact it is also impression that some mental conflict existed among the Bolshevik elite arbiters, whether there should be "proletarian" culture as such or if the Revolution ought to mean the dissolution of the classes and the development of a post-proletarian freed working class matured culture. Would that mean the proletarians simply appropriating and assimilating bourgeois high culture using political common sense to easily filter out the stuff that depended on class stratification, the way optimists about easy, quick and effectively thorough "forgetting" about racism would ensue with the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s in America OTL and we could soon stop worrying about racism; versus a more pessimistic notion that cultural evolution of a revolutionary Communist culture would involve a lot of painful revision. Stalinism in principle took the latter view on paper, while taking the opposite view in practice--"culture" for Stalin meant basically appropriating bourgeois culture suitably censored and modified along very philistine lines for proletarian authenticity. The avante-garde types as far as I know were pretty flaky about passionate Marxist-Leninism, being focused on the soft-focus implementation of liberal style freedom taken to the n'th power.

Since the ATL has few and subtle divergences overseas from the USA versus OTL, the libertine avante-garde is going to suffer badly and were in deep trouble long before we can expect Red victory in the USA to be established, by roughly 1934. I daresay some escaped the worst fate, though I don't know what became of the director-auteur of the movie I've been referencing--I could look it up but holidays put time pressure on my posts, I am sharing my room with my brother and sister in law and have limited computer access! Aelita surely knows, she named him in posts elsewhere--his name anyway, dunno if she knows his OTL fate.

Mind, Stalin was a fool to purge this movie; it really puts the Soviet Union in a beautiful light and I detect enough good Marxism and general communist spirit in it to pass reasonable muster. I am especially struck by the brilliant imagery in a late scene where the revolutionary, in a cultural sense, of radio broadcasts are illustrated. (This is a silent movie, the technology of talkies was just being developed at the time it was made and modern versions have different musical sound tracks to go with it. There are few title cards too, it mostly relies on visual imagery alone, brilliantly IMH and not film-critic trained O-I have taken a handful of cinema classes but nothing to boast too much of--this is how I have seen Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will though) An iconic shack on some distant rural collective farm is shown with bearded peasants gathered round the horn style speaker of the radio as images of science, technology, and high culture come out like so many bubbles. I guess in his true priorities Stalin knew what he was doing of course.

Anyway for the ATL one can hope some of the Soviet avante-garde fled overseas and if not before the Revolutionary civil war, while it was in progress some made their way to the USA/UASR, and others were attracted in later, while yet others survived more or less in the Stalinist USSR and some of those made their way to America before the world war. So more of the legacy of this vibrant cultural phase may carry over into the UASR scene, and after Stalin passes, perhaps gradually filter back to the USSR.

Relative to OTL then, the Soviet Union, even in the Stalinist period (where Stalin himself is constrained a bit to be more diplomatic toward more libertarian-libertine potentials of Leninist Communism to keep useful ties to the Red Yanks open--vice versa I think Aelita should consider portraying struggles between Yankee Reds of a puritan streak, they lose of course, but surely some will be talking about not being distracted by libertine sex drugs and rock'n'roll self indulgence (not technically rock yet, but its so-called OTL "race music" precursors and I think it is pretty canon we get pretty hard rock by the '50s, and more people even of older generations admit to liking it--probably more plainly African American rooted too, not requiring as much veiling of that as OTL). Probably a lot less hard drugs along lines of heroin; I do think a certain degree of puritan disapproval of something so very damaging and soma-ing out would carry over, along a rational medical model of reasoning, but marijuana would be no more or less stigmatized than alcohol, indeed somewhat preferred on rational grounds of damage done. Also, modern weed is massively strengthened every generation by selective breeding, this process would start earlier but be more prudently regulated and guided than the OTL black-market driven process, so more breeding and eventually genetic engineering effort would go toward making it less harmful as a smoked potential carcinogen rather than simply increasing the dosage--which is to be sure another route toward lowering the carcinogen danger, albeit only for a fixed level of inebriation. Brownies and cookies and so forth would be more common versus smoking also, but Red America needs to be weened off tobacco to be sure.

Anyway, across the board in Russia, we could expect a slightly less oppressive hypocritical puritanism in the USSR while Stalin lives versus OTL, and a gradual relaxation again notably improving on OTL, with less indulgence of massive alcohol and tobacco use (both favored by the Soviet state OTL because they got lots of revenue from them as well as for deeper cultural reasons--attempts to crack down on either got IIRC Khrushchev in trouble as well as Gorbachev) though I suppose both persist pretty strongly, and more of alternative drugs (which is to say, less severe prison sentences and more medicalization of the restriction process, medicalized in the sincere sense of "curing" people of the "abuse" where abuse is defined as any use whatsoever, rather than veiling another mode of punishment) and what a liberal Westerner of OTL with a fair degree of feminist consciousness might recognize as rational sexual mores, albeit closer to what cultural conservatives would be at least grudgingly tolerant of--there "should" be shame and guilt, punishing consequences of "irresponsible" behavior, but softened by indulgence of fallible humanity perhaps. I'll not venture into the minefield of LGBT etc tolerance/acceptance/embrace spectrum since I don't trust my limited insights into Russian culture that far; again UASR contacts will surely soften this, to what degree I dare not guess, versus OTL. Stalin's death would begin a process of sporadic surges toward American standards in the ATL. But a major factor checking those in the ATL would be jealous Russian/Soviet cultural identity as "not-Yanks" among the Reds, the intra bloc rivalry will remain a thing on some level--individual Soviet citizens might get grudging toleration of "Yankee indulgence" but others will take pride in "Soviet morality and self-discipline" probably essentially forever.

So in the ATL, relative to American radical libertinism, the Soviets will remain relatively prudish and for that reason, or rather as part of a self-reinforcing social complex, remain notably less practically democratic and tolerant than the UASR. Still one can hope than any Soviet citizens who find this deeply oppressive will be able to avail themselves of voting with their feet to exile in the Western Hemisphere somewhere, with large expatriate Russian and other Soviet people diasporas persisting to soften the pain of exile. (Vice versa, perhaps there are orders of magnitude more Western hemisphere Yanks and other Americans, Latin Americans mostly, maybe a whole wave of Anglo- and francophone Canadians (in separate batches) forming expatriate populations in the USSR, craving the more traditionally rigid society perpetuated by relative Soviet traditionalism. So, an enormous level of cultural exchange between both. Trans polar flight will be a big thing, and if suborbital travel can ever be cost effective, expect a lot of it between North America and the great sprawl of Soviet territory.
 
Thanks to inner-cultural exchange, it is likely the Russians will abandon their prudishness.

Hence being able to enjoy a good romp in the mud in the present day ITTL.
I Must Learn To Summarize:

In general Russians would be relatively prudish vs Red Yanks.

In specific I don't think Russians found the mud bath thing racy at all, not shockingly so anyway. That's a wild guess on my part though.
 
Anglo-Saxon Purism( By Bookmark1995)
This was inspired by a comment on the Discord server, about how due to British English will be made more French due to the union between Britain and France.

This could inspire all kinds of...nonsense. So here is some of that nonsense.

WTF.UASR-The Webpage Devoted to Crazy Nonsense You Could Never Imagine Had We Not Told You

Anglo-Saxon Purism or

upload_2018-11-28_23-2-7.jpeg
Beowulf, Original Text

An English hyper-nationalist movement devoted to ensuring that only Old English is the official language of the United Kingdom, and that only Anglo-Saxons can inhabit England.

Say What?!

Yes, its true.

Tell Me More

About 50,000 people found in Southern England, whenever they can, speak only in Old English-the one in which the famed epic Beowulf was written. In fact, they give away free copies of the story in the original Old English at the unfortunate few who dare go their meetings. Their website is also written entirely in Old English.

They are known for their extreme xenophobia: despising Indian billionaires, French students, and even Scottish, Welsh, and Irish people. They are known for attacking the occasional Indian expatriate, voting for the National Front, and burning copies of the Canterbury Tales.

They believe that the Normans "corrupted" the English, and led to England becoming "obscenely" multicultural.

Why?

To understand the movement, you need to understand the history of English.

As stated, English has evolved greatly over the centuries. It started out as a Germanic offshoot (as the original Anglo-Saxons were Germanic settlers to the formerly Roman British Isles), but after the Norman Conquest, it became more and more French.

Beginning in the 16th-17th, English began to evolve into the modern version most of the world speaks today, absorbing many Latin phrases. But this was not without controversy [1]. Even in this time period, there were the occasional scholar who felt this Latin mixing was corrupting the original language. Academics like John Cheke felt that English was being weakened by the constant use of Latin-although since he used his argument with Latin-English words, you can see this attitude was already complete bullshit.

The current Anglo-Saxon Purism was founded by John Welles (1915-1983) in 1960. Welles, a Newcastle plumber, was a man who resented that his children were being forced to learn French. To him, French had destroyed.

In a completely unrelated topic, Welles has been a follower of Oswald Moseley, and an admire of the British fascist turncoat, Lord Haw Haw. But, why bring that up? That certainly didn't isn't relevant .

In his 1960 book, Anglo-Saxon Greatness (written, of course, in Old English), he writes a rambling text denouncing "frogs, Indians, and Jews for conspiring to destroy Anglo-Saxon greatness." His text more or less is a mixture of falsehood and vicious racist diatribes against everything Welles hated.

Welles died in 1983, but thanks to the Internet, his ideals have gained new ground among similarly misguided group of people angered about seeming Indian and West German influence in British society.

[1] OTL, this was called the Inkhorn controversy.
 
Anglo-Saxon Purism

Hardee har har!

Anglo-Saxon speakers began picking up foreign words, largely Church Latin and Greek, the moment the various Heptarchy kingdoms converted to Christianity. English speakers seem to have some kind of linguistic kleptomania; why make up an "authentically English" word when a perfectly good word in For'n is so easy to just appropriate? So we have two words for the same kind of tropical storm, from Caribbean and Chinese languages, depending on whether they are in the Atlantic or Pacific--hurricane, typhoon.

Anyway the Christian Saxons just loved their Latin and Greek Church words. They could also back-translate them into Saxon if they wanted to, but I think there was a general pride in showing off knowing the "proper" foreign ones.

All the Norman Conquest did was double the vocabulary and we Englished the hell out of Norman French. Then they went on a global spree in Early Modern times and gobbled them down, to the point we just don't notice how eclectic our vocabulary has become. It's why our spelling is such a nightmare.

I have to wonder, I'm sure we've been over this before, was there much of a movement to rationalize American English spelling after the Revolution? I've already tried to transliterate the Gettysburg Address into Cyrillic and apparently made quite a hash of it--I don't see Americans systematically adopting Cyrillic (which would need a bunch of specialized adaptions for English phonemes anyway, not found in Russian) for English. But I do think that many will graduate high school able to read elementary Russian in Cyrillic, and if they don't learn it there they will in their Army training--maybe that goes out of fashion in the period when the Comintern is split between Western and Eastern blocs but I think it will come back long before the anti-Fascist War generation is too aged.

For English to really work with a letter for each phoneme, we will need a bunch of new letters, some of which (Greek Theta, Old English Thorn, for instance) are lying around fairly ready to hand, others of which would need to be invented. Perhaps we could accomplish something with cedilla and other little diacritical marks, but by and large I think it would fall back onto multi-letter compounds. Also someone criticizing my attempt at Cyrillizing Lincoln's great speech felt that attempting to write it phonetically will always create divergences because people with different regional dialects would properly use different vowels and so forth, even accounting for systemic shifts between the dialects. So some of the controversy about my weird choice of letters came from my sounding out words differently in my head than my correspondent did. Sticking to our wacky eclectic grab bag of half a dozen ways to write the same sound and preserving archaic sounds no one sounds out any more tends to standardize the written language and fudge these regional differences.

I wonder which language out there OTL with a highly standardized "what you see is what you hear" alphabet adaptation comes closest to the range of phonemes we have in English; that would be the one to appropriate and see how it all looks.
 
Hardee har har!

Anglo-Saxon speakers began picking up foreign words, largely Church Latin and Greek, the moment the various Heptarchy kingdoms converted to Christianity. English speakers seem to have some kind of linguistic kleptomania; why make up an "authentically English" word when a perfectly good word in For'n is so easy to just appropriate? So we have two words for the same kind of tropical storm, from Caribbean and Chinese languages, depending on whether they are in the Atlantic or Pacific--hurricane, typhoon.

Anyway the Christian Saxons just loved their Latin and Greek Church words. They could also back-translate them into Saxon if they wanted to, but I think there was a general pride in showing off knowing the "proper" foreign ones.

All the Norman Conquest did was double the vocabulary and we Englished the hell out of Norman French. Then they went on a global spree in Early Modern times and gobbled them down, to the point we just don't notice how eclectic our vocabulary has become. It's why our spelling is such a nightmare.

I have to wonder, I'm sure we've been over this before, was there much of a movement to rationalize American English spelling after the Revolution? I've already tried to transliterate the Gettysburg Address into Cyrillic and apparently made quite a hash of it--I don't see Americans systematically adopting Cyrillic (which would need a bunch of specialized adaptions for English phonemes anyway, not found in Russian) for English. But I do think that many will graduate high school able to read elementary Russian in Cyrillic, and if they don't learn it there they will in their Army training--maybe that goes out of fashion in the period when the Comintern is split between Western and Eastern blocs but I think it will come back long before the anti-Fascist War generation is too aged.

For English to really work with a letter for each phoneme, we will need a bunch of new letters, some of which (Greek Theta, Old English Thorn, for instance) are lying around fairly ready to hand, others of which would need to be invented. Perhaps we could accomplish something with cedilla and other little diacritical marks, but by and large I think it would fall back onto multi-letter compounds. Also someone criticizing my attempt at Cyrillizing Lincoln's great speech felt that attempting to write it phonetically will always create divergences because people with different regional dialects would properly use different vowels and so forth, even accounting for systemic shifts between the dialects. So some of the controversy about my weird choice of letters came from my sounding out words differently in my head than my correspondent did. Sticking to our wacky eclectic grab bag of half a dozen ways to write the same sound and preserving archaic sounds no one sounds out any more tends to standardize the written language and fudge these regional differences.

I wonder which language out there OTL with a highly standardized "what you see is what you hear" alphabet adaptation comes closest to the range of phonemes we have in English; that would be the one to appropriate and see how it all looks.

I am aware of how much English can absorb and adapt.

I was just imagining an ITTL fringe movement that could possibly exist-they don't often read-or try to understand history.
 
The Second Cuban Studio System (By Mr.E)
The Revolution split Hollywood in almost the same way it did the Army. Much of the ground talent (directors, set designers, writers, actors, cameramen, etc.) stayed behind because of the more beneficial nature of the new regime, and the strongly anti-union, anti-Communist studio heads fled after the Reds victory.


However, their journeys were far spread out. Adolf Zukor used the Paramount owned theaters in Canada to comfortably re-establish Paramount there out of Ottawa. Louis B. Mayer took MGM to Britain, creating a home within Alexander Korda’s Denham Film Studio. The rest of the big studios, including Universal, RKO, Warner Brothers and Columbia settled in MacArthurist Cuba. Eventually, Warner Bros and Columbia would dominate the Cuban film scene, with respective studio heads Jack Warner and Harry Cohn becoming parts of MacArthur’s inner circle and their sponsored brand of propaganda (most notably wartime “Macaco” films) becoming big hits. Universal, however, managed to survive by merging with Fox Films[1], and RKO would largely compete in the periphery with other low-budget studios.


This new studio system, the norm for the post-Revolution and war periods, is often regarded as beginning its unravelling in the late 1950’s. Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, who had defined the Studio System through their state subsidized blockbusters, often co-productions between their studios, had an increasingly contentious relationship, as they secretly jockeyed for more power and influence (meaning generally more profits). Due to his direct, authoritarian nature and opposition to encroaching Franco-British films (Cohn had spearheaded the Cinema Act to combat this), Cohn was generally preferred amongst the Cuban elite. However, Cohn’s health took a turn for the worse with a severe heart attack in 1957 with another following in 1958. As Cohn lay dying, Jack Warner seized the opportunity and secretly organized a syndicate to purchase more and more stock in Columbia, right under Cohn’s nose (a popular legend said his death was prompted by the revelation of Warner’s activities)[2]. Eventually, after Cohn’s death, Warner seized complete control of Columbia, and merged it to form Warner-Columbia.


The studio became overstretched, and the subsidies offered by the Department of Communciations gradually petered out under Robert Kennedy. Just as well, television slowly made its way into Cuba, meaning more competitions for films. Once their big budget war epic The Fires of Venezuela and Arthurian adaptation The Ill-Made Knight flopped at the box office, Warner-Columbia collapsed under its own weight, and would declare bankrupcy. Its film library, theaters, and studios sold off.


While W-C’s collapse is regarded as the end of the first Cuban Studio System, the beginnings of the Second actually had its roots before even the merger, with various new players coming into prominence to replace Jack Warner.


In 1947, Universal was bought out by the Rank Organization. Now restructured as “Universal World Pictures,” it would largely become the Cuban subsidiary to J. Arthur Rank’s film company, becoming one of the first to utilize the “quota quickies” enacted under the Cinema Act. However, the backing of Rank meant that they also could make “exotic” pictures, filmed in places across the FBU colonial empire. This allowed them to ride out the end of subsidies and come out as W-C devolved into bankruptcy. Universal would utilize both quota quickies and big British productions to replace its output. In 1969, Oliver!, the adaptation of the popular West End version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, would become a major success, prompting Universal to go hard into the genre. Eventually, they acquired the rights to “East End Story”, a British musical centering on a star-crossed lovers tale set among London gangs in the East End. However, to appeal to the newly liberated native Cuban consumers, the setting was changed to Havana, with the gangs being low-class, immigrant whites and Cuban. Havana Story is largely regarded as a classic.


The need to appeal to the new middle class Cubans was also a major part of the next player’s appeal. In 1952, ex-Warner executive Frank McCarthy would start Santiago Pictures, and grow it by purchasing the increasingly bankrupt Poverty Row Studios. Frank McCarthy would start mostly with documentaries and educational films, going through slow growth. In 1958, McCarthy would hire a young Cuban filmmaker named Manuel Trujillo, who would begin to make specifically Cuban flavored B-Films, tailored more towards a Cuban audience. These features would define the “Mambo film” aesthetic, and keep Santiago afloat with cult successes up until the late 60’s. Trujillo would leave Santiago, and go onto a prolific career, both as a producer of schlocky Mambo films for Franco-British audiences and as a pioneering director and mentor for Cuban filmmakers. McCarthy, in the meantime, would purchase its studio in Havana (and some of its film library), and embarked on directly replacing W-C whilst utilizing Trujillo’s more Cuban oriented approach to adapt to the times. Thus, with his war film A Long Night, McCarthy would embark on making high budget action and thriller films, mostly with a focus towards Cuban audiences while maintaining a largely pro-American stance. This included 1973 spy thriller The Bureau Man and Attack on the USS Freedom, a 1975 thriller involving the communist seizure of a Cuban warship and the resulting war of wills.


The man who would topple Jack Warner as the leading exec of the period was Howard Hughes. A minor producer notable for winning the first Academy Award for The Racket, Hughes reentered the market with his success in real estate and airplanes,in 1948 by purchasing RKO outright, and building it as a company gradually, with what is regarded as the first “Mambo Film”, the Western Deliverance. In the 60’s, Hughes expanded both RKO’s slate of films, and the growing television empire that he built under its name, using its own library, both key to a larger media empire. The eclipse of W-C was the breakthrough needed. Hughes purchased the rest of the Warner-Columbia catalogue and even the use of the old WB name and symbol from the almost destitute Jack Warner, and added them into RKO-TV catalogue. Hughes would use the Warner name in “the Warner Bros. Grand Casino and Resort”, a large casino in Monaco utilizing the famous Warner water tower and iconography from Warner Bros films.


Hughes biggest advantage was his growing TV empire. Along with right-wing news programs, he used RKO as a means of both filmmaking and TV, making series like Scotland Yard and Holmes, both British set police procedurals (the latter a modernization of the Sherlock Holmes stories). The combination of this and building a minor media empire with the RKO name allowed Hughes to surpass his rivals.


The 70’s saw two spheres of Cuban filmmaking arise. One, the three studios that had taken over the former Warner-Columbia, two of which owned by British or British based companies, making larger budget films, with the underground “Mambo Film” scene with low budget films by those like Trujillo. This balance would survive into the 80’s.


However, cracks would begin to show, as more studios formed and Franco-British orgs began a larger push into the market. Santiago’s penchant for high budget blockbusters would make it increasingly unsustainable as Franco-British blockbusters of generally higher quality would make their way into Cuba. McCarthy attempted to pre-empt this, much as he did for Macaco films with A Long Night. To seize on the success of Alien, he would try to produce his own SF creature feature with Night of the Crawlers, an invasion film with radiated worms causing a large plague. While regarded as a cult classic, it was not as big a success as Santiago needed, and as they tried to chase trends, they would sink lower and lower into debt due to multiple failures.


As the late 80’s approached, with Santiago’s decline, a major blow occurred with the repeal of the Cinema Act in 1988. With films now more expensive to make, the studio system would rapidly collapse much as it did after Fires of Venezuela. Santiago was dealt a fatal blow with this and the death of Frank McCarthy in 1990, causing their eventually bankruptcy and purchase by mogul Ted Kennedy.


Universal World would survive, but downgraded, with operations largely transferred to Britain. Hughes’ death in 1976 would see his properties more consolidated, and priority was given to television over film. Eventually, RKO Films (renamed RKO-Warner in 1994) would be relocated to France, with the studio transferred to Spain.


The fall of Santiago would see the end of a formal studio system, but new native studios, mostly encouraged by the new quota system, have arisen to become the new Cuban industry, though the problem remains the preeminence of Franco-British films over native ones.


[1] Later 20th Century Fox OTL

[2] OTL, Jack Warner did a similar thing to buy out his brothers after taking WB public. Once it was revealed, Harry Warner purportedly died of shock.
 

Bulldoggus

Banned
About 50,000 people found in Southern England, whenever they can, speak only in Old English-the one in which the famed epic Beowulf was written. In fact, they give away free copies of the story in the original Old English at the unfortunate few who dare go their meetings. Their website is also written entirely in Old English.
Fifty Thousand? HIGH estimate there. I'd shave off a zero, possibly more. I'd say 1,000 really hardcore true believers plus a few thousand-odd hangers on- some other far righties who like the spirit of the idea if not the idea itself, some out-of-touch history types with an interest in reviving some Old Anglo-Saxon cultural stuff but not into the whole ethnic cleansing side of things, some weird Celtic Nationalists who like the idea of fragmenting the monolithic Britishness of English Nationalism. And that isn't even getting into the fact that some early British Socialists believed that the Anglo-Saxon period was a utopian age of freedom and porto-democracy before Billy the Bastard came and ruined it all. But there wouldn't be 50,000 people- that's like enough to win local offices.
 
Fifty Thousand? HIGH estimate there. I'd shave off a zero, possibly more. I'd say 1,000 really hardcore true believers plus a few thousand-odd hangers on- some other far righties who like the spirit of the idea if not the idea itself, some out-of-touch history types with an interest in reviving some Old Anglo-Saxon cultural stuff but not into the whole ethnic cleansing side of things, some weird Celtic Nationalists who like the idea of fragmenting the monolithic Britishness of English Nationalism. And that isn't even getting into the fact that some early British Socialists believed that the Anglo-Saxon period was a utopian age of freedom and porto-democracy before Billy the Bastard came and ruined it all. But there wouldn't be 50,000 people- that's like enough to win local offices.

I figured greater French-English cooperation would lead to greater anger among Anglo-Saxon supremacists.
 

Bulldoggus

Banned
I figured greater French-English cooperation would lead to greater anger among Anglo-Saxon supremacists.
I mean sure, but I think anti-French politics would be much more "Loutish UKIP Types bragging about Waterloo" than "Medievalist revival and the attempted restoration of an 8th Century Language." It's just a bit too esoteric (and tough to get into- Old English is hard to learn!) to be a political movement of real significance.
 
I mean sure, but I think anti-French politics would be much more "Loutish UKIP Types bragging about Waterloo" than "Medievalist revival and the attempted restoration of an 8th Century Language." It's just a bit too esoteric (and tough to get into- Old English is hard to learn!) to be a political movement of real significance.

I figured 50,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to, like, 60 million British people.
 
The Democratic Socialists of America, who have a sitting Congresswoman in a country of 315 million, have 52,000 members. This is the largest leftist organization in the USA. And all you need to do is sign up. You don’t have to learn a language.



So what you’re proposing is that reviving a dead language for obscure nationalist reasons is several times more popular in alt-England than socialism is in America.
 

Bulldoggus

Banned
The Democratic Socialists of America, who have a sitting Congresswoman in a country of 315 million, have 52,000 members. This is the largest leftist organization in the USA. And all you need to do is sign up. You don’t have to learn a language.



So what you’re proposing is that reviving a dead language for obscure nationalist reasons is several times more popular in alt-England than socialism is in America.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
 
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