Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I mean, basically
And @PresidentZinn I meant to respond to you but it deleted my reply! My apologies! I agree that this cognitive dissonance in Richmond is a really interesting Avenue coming up. The Chief doesn’t need to worry, because Steiner will break the siege of Richmond any day now…
You hate to see it when a nation throws aways a tried and true method for suicidal frontal assaults.
Those who've been waiting for 500+ pages of content for the Dixie-screw to manifest won't have to wait too much longer...
An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
"...early green shoots of the New Culture Movement in the early 1910s, particularly under the nurturing of Cai Yuanpei, the famed essayist-turned-chancellor of Peking University and one of the leading lights of Chinese liberalism to this day. Before "New Culture Movement' had earned its name, though, it was simply an amalgam of new ideas sprouting up across China in the uneasy peace that had followed the Civil War. A generation of young Chinese who had never known anything but blood (mostly against their countrymen) and the state tottering on near-collapse, and the defeat of the Qing dynasty in China south of the wall, now looked to an uncertain but intriguing future not just politically but socially as well as the constrictions of the arch-reactionary Qing society evaporated. China could become whatever they wanted, and what that whatever might be lay at the core of the debates that exploded in academic circles in Peking, amongst publishers in Shanghai, and amongst revolutionaries in Canton.
Thousands of intellectuals educated overseas - typically in the United States but increasingly in Japan - streamed back to Chinese shores during the middle period of the Second Republic bubbling with excitement and new ideas. They wore Western clothes, consumed Western literature and had often adopted Western mores, and took a particularly harsh view of Chinese culture and history. It quickly became taken for granted that China's weakness vis a vis the West and its frequent humiliations had been due to something rotten at the core of Chinese traditionalism, of a stultified culture whose insularity and stubborn clinging to its unique attachment to Confucian thinking had left it in decline and exposed to the vagaries of Western chauvinism. This was a conclusion similar to the one drawn in Japan in the 1870s - that the country would need to drastically reform to keep up with Europe and the United States - but unlike the more muscular and ambitious Japanese imperialism that had finally sprung through in making the Philippines a semi-protectorate in 1903, there was an element of self-loathing inherent in the New Culture Movement that sought nearly to entirely reject the old ways and, in its own words, create a new culture from whole cloth.
The ultimate embodiment of the New Culture was republicanism, and many young Chinese intellectuals, artisans and merchants saw the Republic, flawed as it was, as a direct rejection of the Qing-era backwardness but considered the Second Republic insufficiently revolutionary, not having done enough to throw off the yoke of old what with the multitudes of former Qing officials still dotting its upper hierarchies and the corrupt conservatism of Li Yuanhong and his ilk still in charge. A truly new China needed to entirely reject the past, they said - it was in this context that a new vernacular Chinese was instituted, and thousands of these young Chinese converted eagerly to Christianity, particularly in Guangdong and Fujian, associating Christendom - particularly Protestantism - with innovation and renewal. This urge of republicanism and political religiosity, combined with the tens of thousands of new businesses and schools Westerners were permitted to open across China during the Second Republic correspondingly led to a burst of Sinophilia in the West, including in the United States, which saw in the Republic of China perhaps more of a natural ideological counterpart than monarchic and aggressive Japan. Chinese became huge fans of transliterated copies of classic American books, and missionaries from Britain or Germany found themselves introducing football to compete with the Americans teaching Chinese students baseball, both of which remain China's dominant sports to this day.
Such romantic sentiments about "New China," while common in the West, perhaps overstated the revolutionary nature of this new Republic. The New Culture Movement was, at least up until the 1920s, very much an academic pursuit, an interesting line of thought that had significant political implications in Nanking (Song Chiao-jen was not favorable towards it, while Sun Yat-sen was at the very least intrigued, particularly in the rise of legal evangelism as he himself was a baptized Christian) but little day to day impact on the average Chinese. Indeed, this explosion of Western dress, attitudes and ideologies in tandem with more and more foreign businessmen and missionaries arriving to establish firms and churches that seemed to benefit them more than locals elicited more than a little tension on the ground, and a great many Chinese spent the late 1910s revisiting the works of Confucius not to reject them but to reinvigorate traditional Chinese thought, and traditional dress and folk religions enjoyed something of a renaissance in a quieter rebellion against foreign influence than the savage violence of the Boxers nearly twenty years before..."
- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
Thousands of intellectuals educated overseas - typically in the United States but increasingly in Japan - streamed back to Chinese shores during the middle period of the Second Republic bubbling with excitement and new ideas. They wore Western clothes, consumed Western literature and had often adopted Western mores, and took a particularly harsh view of Chinese culture and history. It quickly became taken for granted that China's weakness vis a vis the West and its frequent humiliations had been due to something rotten at the core of Chinese traditionalism, of a stultified culture whose insularity and stubborn clinging to its unique attachment to Confucian thinking had left it in decline and exposed to the vagaries of Western chauvinism. This was a conclusion similar to the one drawn in Japan in the 1870s - that the country would need to drastically reform to keep up with Europe and the United States - but unlike the more muscular and ambitious Japanese imperialism that had finally sprung through in making the Philippines a semi-protectorate in 1903, there was an element of self-loathing inherent in the New Culture Movement that sought nearly to entirely reject the old ways and, in its own words, create a new culture from whole cloth.
The ultimate embodiment of the New Culture was republicanism, and many young Chinese intellectuals, artisans and merchants saw the Republic, flawed as it was, as a direct rejection of the Qing-era backwardness but considered the Second Republic insufficiently revolutionary, not having done enough to throw off the yoke of old what with the multitudes of former Qing officials still dotting its upper hierarchies and the corrupt conservatism of Li Yuanhong and his ilk still in charge. A truly new China needed to entirely reject the past, they said - it was in this context that a new vernacular Chinese was instituted, and thousands of these young Chinese converted eagerly to Christianity, particularly in Guangdong and Fujian, associating Christendom - particularly Protestantism - with innovation and renewal. This urge of republicanism and political religiosity, combined with the tens of thousands of new businesses and schools Westerners were permitted to open across China during the Second Republic correspondingly led to a burst of Sinophilia in the West, including in the United States, which saw in the Republic of China perhaps more of a natural ideological counterpart than monarchic and aggressive Japan. Chinese became huge fans of transliterated copies of classic American books, and missionaries from Britain or Germany found themselves introducing football to compete with the Americans teaching Chinese students baseball, both of which remain China's dominant sports to this day.
Such romantic sentiments about "New China," while common in the West, perhaps overstated the revolutionary nature of this new Republic. The New Culture Movement was, at least up until the 1920s, very much an academic pursuit, an interesting line of thought that had significant political implications in Nanking (Song Chiao-jen was not favorable towards it, while Sun Yat-sen was at the very least intrigued, particularly in the rise of legal evangelism as he himself was a baptized Christian) but little day to day impact on the average Chinese. Indeed, this explosion of Western dress, attitudes and ideologies in tandem with more and more foreign businessmen and missionaries arriving to establish firms and churches that seemed to benefit them more than locals elicited more than a little tension on the ground, and a great many Chinese spent the late 1910s revisiting the works of Confucius not to reject them but to reinvigorate traditional Chinese thought, and traditional dress and folk religions enjoyed something of a renaissance in a quieter rebellion against foreign influence than the savage violence of the Boxers nearly twenty years before..."
- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
POSSIBLE IDEA FOR DEALING WITH DEMOGRAPHICS: Maybe some political establishment in the south convinces the White populace that they will be 'outnumbered' by Blacks or something. Could make the census less of a mess by 1930.
A film like Downfall ITTL based on this would be great! The memes it would generate alone
Can we expect a China that is much stronger on the world stage of Football ITTL? its always blown my mind how much of a failure the Chinese Governments attempts at building their football has been.
Well, if he doesn't, we get the more mild(?) hand of President Patton of Virginia who basically has to play the part of Yankee stooge and mollify his own people while working with the occuation. Having already lost a son to the war (we don't know in this ATL how many kids he had - he most certainly didn't meet his OTL wife), I can't help but feel rather bad for the man.
Every time I see the name “Vardaman, “ I think of the Bundren’s little boy in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, who was in fact named after that piece-of-trash politician. Of course the boy’s father, Anse, was garbage personified.
I suppose Bill, who was IOTL born n 1897, is butterflied away in the Cincoverse? If he wasn’t, he’d most likely have died in the war.
The great and almost too-much-documented paradox is how one of the most deplorable states (Mississippi) by most socioeconomic and historical measures, could produce one of the greatest American novelists. Or maybe that’s the reason. After all, Faulkner wasn’t the most pleasant man himself (the Coen Bros.’s expy of him in Barton Fink nails him.)
Economics in the Western Hemisphere thought...
The six primary nations in the war (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, CSA, Mexico and USA) were six of the seven largest economies in the Western hemisphere (Canada being the seventh). I know the CSA falls *hard*, but I'm not sure whether it can fall out of the top 7. If it can, who would it fall behind? The only possibilities in my mind are Venezuela, Colombia and the postwar restored RoT, but given that the RoT will have at least *some* war damage and the author has said that Colombia ends up with French related conservatives taking Panama out of Colombia, that indicates that Colombia is in for some not happy times. So it boils down to whether Venezuela will gain enough from being aligned with (and an oil source for?) victorious Germany. That of course will be affected by the alignment of Romania post CEW...
The six primary nations in the war (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, CSA, Mexico and USA) were six of the seven largest economies in the Western hemisphere (Canada being the seventh). I know the CSA falls *hard*, but I'm not sure whether it can fall out of the top 7. If it can, who would it fall behind? The only possibilities in my mind are Venezuela, Colombia and the postwar restored RoT, but given that the RoT will have at least *some* war damage and the author has said that Colombia ends up with French related conservatives taking Panama out of Colombia, that indicates that Colombia is in for some not happy times. So it boils down to whether Venezuela will gain enough from being aligned with (and an oil source for?) victorious Germany. That of course will be affected by the alignment of Romania post CEW...
Its been stated that Vardman lost a son to the war - though one could happily butterfly his life a bit and say he has more than one son to carry on his legacy in the ATL - though, considering he'sthe one left holding the bag when the war inevitably ends (or manages to exit stage left prior to that point, but still having been tarnished by leading the Confederacy during the darkest days of the war and failing), I'm not sure how much of a legacy he's going to have. I could see the Red Scarves outliving him and honoring his memory (after all, Vardaman would have been able to save the Confederacy if he hadn't been stabed in the back by the planter class who didn't want to give more to save the nation!) and propping up some relative as a successor.
In terms of postwar punishments of CSA Politicians... From the Tillman bio from thread 1
" He remained in the Senate as a backbencher until his capture by American forces near Salisbury, North Carolina in December 1916; he was released from prison eight months later and returned to Richmond, where he passed away a year later."
(Salisbury is in the middle of North Carolina, if there are US forces there, the question is whether that is from US Forces working south from Army Command Potomac or working east from Army Command Ohio)
I'm trying to guess from that what punishment will fall to those actually in charge during the heart of the war. 8 months for a 69(?) year old senator who didn't have much power makes me wonder what happens to those who were actually in charge. With the USA withdrawing in 1921, do they actually take those who get longer prison terms with them? (As I've said before, we don't have any good modern examples of victory and leave)
" He remained in the Senate as a backbencher until his capture by American forces near Salisbury, North Carolina in December 1916; he was released from prison eight months later and returned to Richmond, where he passed away a year later."
(Salisbury is in the middle of North Carolina, if there are US forces there, the question is whether that is from US Forces working south from Army Command Potomac or working east from Army Command Ohio)
I'm trying to guess from that what punishment will fall to those actually in charge during the heart of the war. 8 months for a 69(?) year old senator who didn't have much power makes me wonder what happens to those who were actually in charge. With the USA withdrawing in 1921, do they actually take those who get longer prison terms with them? (As I've said before, we don't have any good modern examples of victory and leave)
Well, I think the US honestly would keep a partial presence along the Mississippi for a few yearsin order to keep anyone from getting ideas; still
in the CSA, but possibly an occupation zone a 10-15 miles either side of the Mississippi from Missouri to New Orleans? (Some ugly little situation about the occupation in Baton Rouge involving one Huey Long, perhaps?)
The rest of the CSA, however...
It’s possible Tillman may haven’t gotten released early because of bad health. Unfortunately, even for those in power, I get the feeling their sentences will be much much shorter than they should be.
I think you may be reading that a bit wrong. Remember that the war is technically still going on in December of 1916 (though the writing is on the wall). Tillerman likely isn't arrested, subjected to trial and then released. He was probably captured and is being held as a war captive before being expatriated - remember the mysterious adventures of the captured US Congressmen when the Confederacy took DC (who have apparently vanished from the written record after being tantalizingly teased to us readers!); so there is already a precedent in this war for politicians of the opposing side being taken captive when captured.
No doubt Tillerman had the bad luck ofnot fleeing in time and was simply swept up and then released sometime after the peace treaty was signed - no doubt his captivity being used to ensure good behavior on the part of the Confederacy.
Our good Swedish King has stated that there likely won't be war crimes trials after this war, because such things were - while not unheard of, pretty rare during this era. But we could probably expect that many of the WORST human rights deniers in the COnfederacy to meet nasty ends thanks to extra legal reprisals. Which does kind of fit the image we've been getting of the post-war Confederacy.
On a related note, I wonder if we will get memoirs written by the captives who were enslaved with the fall of Maryland and shipped South They are most certainly going to have stories to tell; and it would be a fascinating look at the Confederate domestic front during the final year and some months of the war. Hint hint
