The Footprint of Mussolini - TL

[TheDetailer]

I always imagined Libertarian Socialism as in a hypothetical middle ground, somewhere in between more moderate ideologies like Social Democracy, and more extreme ideologies like Anarcho-Communism.

 

[Icedaemon]

The logic is that private property (the ability to own a factory, or for somebody in NY to own a piece of land in Wyoming - legal ownership that goes beyond 'mere possession') requires some sort of state for its existence. If you reign in or get rid of the state (the libertarian part) you'd end up with communal/collective ownership of the big stuff like land, industry, etc (the socialism part).

If history is any guide, absent the state you'd get a mix of libertarian socialism and oligarchic feudalism/warlordism/caudillloism, but that's neither here nor there philosophically speaking.

'Communal overship' is either a farce or a smokescreen, most often for the tyrants claiming to be ruling for the people, sometimes for simple anarchy.

From what I can see from how it has played out in the past, in the absence of a functional state you don't so much have a mix of this 'libertarian socialism' thing and warlordism, but rather have fertile ground for warlordism to develop, as the most ruthless individuals or small groups fill the power vacuum. Warlordism can develop into feudalism as structure is imposed. An oversimplification, but I think a valid one.

 

[Emperor of Pennsylvania]

From what I can see from how it has played out in the past, in the absence of a functional state you don't so much have a mix of this 'libertarian socialism' thing and warlordism, but rather have fertile ground for warlordism to develop, as the most ruthless individuals or small groups fill the power vacuum.

Well, ironically enough, many theoretically anarchist societies resemble states a lot. Like, an anarcho-syndicalist society looks a lot like a union-ruled state if you ask me.

 

[Pmanm]

The Germany Armed Forces may be restricted on size and type of weapons they can have. No heavy armor, heavy artillery, bombers, naval ships larger than a destroyer for example. However, that does not mean that the German military could not train or use them in other countries as part of their defense commitments or that there are stockpiles and arsenals near the German border.

Hi still reading through the TL but I'm hopeful that the French tank projects of the early 50s are accepted and brought into service. It was planned that they'd be used to equip both the French and German militaries and maybe some help from the tank designers at MAN, Henshcel and Daimler-Benz will help tanks like the AMX-50 reach the parameters placed for the project.

 

[Emperor of Pennsylvania]

Okay, I guess I'll repost this idea here to maybe get more of an idea for it.

You know, going with the trend of having in-universe alternate counterparts to real life works of science fiction, I wonder what an in-universe version of Legend of the Galactic Heroes would look like.


First of all, I think that you would see a 4th nation that is communist rather than simply having a democracy, a right-wing dictatorship, and a mercantile dictatorship. The communist state probably emerged from some Sirius Republic loyalists that pulled an Exodus Fleet around the time of the creation of the Galactic Federation. Much like the Earth Cult and Fezzan, the communist faction would be depicted as being completely evil.


Second of all, Reinhard von Lohengramm would probably be explicitly compared to Mussolini due to his nature as a benevolent dictator. But, he would also be a bit of a Rommel analogue too. To go along with the Rommel parallelism, maybe the Goldenbaum Dynasty is extra racist and has a Himmler analogue secretly manipulating it from behind the scenes?


Third of all, the Earth Cult would probably be partially analogous to the Islamic State of Arabia. Also, speaking of "lesser" villains, Job Truniht would probably be explicitly an Afrikaaner rather than merely being implied to be one. Also, maybe the evil capitalist faction of Fezzan isn't lead by an ethnically Russian man like IOTL and is instead lead by a black dude to compare Fezzan to Katanga?


Finally, due to the fact that OTL's Legend of the Galactic Heroes was already rather painfully on the nose when talking about the United Earth Government (to sum things up, the United Earth Government was depicted as a blatant Imperial Japan analogue, complete with a Nanking Massacre-expy which was depicted in graphic detail), maybe the analogues go even further here? Maybe the United Earth Government is depicted as expelling members of ethnic groups it doesn't like to inhospitable planets, to compare the UEG's actions to those of postwar Japan towards to the Ainu?

I would imagine that TTL's LoGH would be way more controversial due to Japan being more nationalist and due to it maybe having an analogy to the expulsion of the Ainu.

Some more thoughts:

-People from the German Empire might not like Legends of the Galactic Heroes since the Goldenbaum Dynasty is essentially an unholy fusion between original pre-World War I German Empire, Prussia, and Nazi Germany. And depicting the Goldenbaum Kaisers as being dictators wouldn't fly too well in a democratic Kaiserreich like Germany.

-Adrian Rubinsky is probably changed into being the leader of the communist nation rather than being the leader of Fezzan. To replace him, a fictional black Landesherr fills a similar role to him. TTL Fezzan serves as a loose Katanga analogue. But, to be fair to TTL Katanga, more time is spent emphasizing how Fezzan has high standards of living.

-Job Truniht, being the fictional evil Afrikaner that he is in a timeline where South Africa is a rogue state, is also racist. That's on top of already being the parasitic, authoritarian, hypocritical asshole who destroys every political organization he gets his hands on which he is depicted as IOTL.

-Since the Earth Cult is somewhat analogous to the Islamic State of Arabia, the extreme depopulation of Earth from a post-nuking population of 1 billion to only having 10 million people, which already occurred in OTL's show, is emphasized more here here. ITTL, the depopulation of Earth is explicitly the Earth Cult's fault, with many people on Earth dying of diseases that have been eradicated elsewhere in the galaxy and the Earth Cult having death camps for political dissidents on Earth.

-Since TTL Reinhard von Lohengramm is partially analogous to Mussolini, Reinhard is probably more prone to orbitally bombarding innocent civilians. Incidents like the bombing of Westerland will happen more than once here.

-Wolfgang Mittermeyer is a bit of a Balbo analogue who is implied to succeed Reinhard at some point.

 

[Gar48]

I know this timeline started more than a year ago and that i should have posted my criticism far sooner, but i i have to say this for myself and to quite literally sleep well at night.

The author has already seen my criticism on another timeline but i am moving my post here to clean up the "North Star is red" from the drama i caused.

Tjis is based on @Sorario's post on "The North star is red", where he calmly explained in detail his reasoning behind the wring of FoM:

Hello, I'm the writer of the TL you speak of.

I usually avoid commenting but I feel that since this is a fairly serious allegation that I'm an apologist for colonialism, occupation or anything of the sort, I thought I should set the record straight.

In the timeline, the following events are committed by the various European regimes on the African continent alone:

1) The use of nuclear weapons and WMDs which kill hundreds of thousands and leave countries in ruins even decades later.
2) Forced expulsions based on ethnic and religious grounds.
3) The creation of a sadistic and hopelessly evil South African pariah, so evil that it's barred from most international organisations.
4) The support of maniacal kleptocrats in the remains of the Congo.
5) The cultural genocide of Arab culture in at least five countries.
6) Blockades and boycotts against any country trying to stop their reigns.
7) The explicit acknowledgement from their leaderships that their presence is for no other purpose than their own benefit and not of the native populations.

Meanwhile:

1) There are multiple successful first world nations in Africa that definitively prove Anti-Black racists wrong when they say a Black country is doomed to fail. In fact, it is precisely this fact that makes Ian Smith realise the folly of his politics and move to moderate.

2) Multiple African states have consolidated into serious geopolitical players and played the overwhelming role in ending certain colonial presences in Africa by their hands alone.

And that's just Africa - in Asia, Vietnam has effectively taken over the Francophonie, much to Paris's outrage. Meanwhile, a longer Dutch colonial presence in Indonesia doomed the country to implosion.

As for my portrayal of certain colonial leaders as being too positive, I would point out I made a Stalinist who was implicated in most of Stalin's crimes a literal saint. I made a Polish Communist dictator who killed thousands a man who defied Stalin to save his country's Jews. Not to mention that practically all the shining moral examples of the timeline (mainly Berlinguer and Anne Frank) - were decisively on the Left, both of whom were bitterly opposed to the colonial wars in Africa.

I don't like to be 100% open online, but I feel I can give context this way that can explain the way I wrote the timeline: the story is highly influenced by my growing up in Northern Ireland, specifically the Irish quarter of Belfast. I was raised in the aftermath of a 30 year conflict where I can't name a single heroic deed in the entire span of the war. I grew up with my MP being a man who murdered a widowed mother and disappeared the body. The First Minister was a man who called my people 'vermin' and the number two (who was trying to kill the man who became First Minister a while back) forcibly turned innocent people into human suicide bombs. And the police all this time had been effectively sanctioning hits on people like my family by handing their info and locations over to genocidal terrorist groups whose dream was that my parents would either be expelled from the land they were born in or in a grave - there is still a sitting MP who endorsed their plan of genocide.

There were many ways I could have processed this information, especially given the Famine, Cromwell and all the individual stories of bigotry and terror my parents and grandparents faced, including a visit by Lenny Murphy. I've had to walk passed UVF memorials to people who only killed Catholic civilians, passed Combat 18 and Kill all Taigs graffiti and knew there were simply certain areas in your city you didn't go into.

Here's how I've come to accept it: wars of land and identity are fought between shades of grey justifying their moral darkness with visions of light that never come, and that ultimately the politics of revenge and grudge, no matter how much right you have to it, is forsaking your responsibility to future generations. And ultimately, in Northern Ireland, we generally accepted that after 30 years of death and horror - we accepted terrorists in government, murderers walking free, injustices never to be righted because my parents wanted me to have the life they never had. I can fully acknowledge how despicably the British state acted in Northern Ireland (collusion, MRF etc) while also acknowledging that things would have been vastly worse had they left - like Bosnia levels of bad. I can support and understand the necessity of Irish independence while firmly believing Ireland would have been better off economically if it stayed in the UK - it doesn't mean I'm Pro British colonialism in Ireland, it just means I acknowledge a godless world of people with having multiple different moral standards that are often in conflict with no easy ways to resolve them.

If you want full honesty, I based Ian Smith on OTL's Ian Paisley - even the final settlement in Rhodesia is essentially a copy of the Good Friday Agreement. I am honestly fascinated by the man, even though he would say my grandparents are all in hell and that I'm going there too. His journey from attacking Civil Rights marchers which perhaps caused the Troubles in the first place to becoming best friends with an IRA commander and agreeing to St Andrews when he finally acknowledged his responsibility to the people of Northern Ireland struck me deeply. One could see in his final interview the sense of regret that had followed him in his later years - it was haunting but it honestly inspired me to think even someone as bigoted as Paisley once was could be. Paisley's story has frankly made me steer clear of 'bad guy/good guy dichotomies' unless it can't be helped - genocide obviously being one.

I don't know if this convinced anyone of the sincerity of my anti-colonialism (always unjustified no matter the economic benefits), anti-Fascism (dear God I'd be executed a thousand times by now if I lived under one) and anti-bigotry (I saw it in all its disgusting self-righteousness and destructiveness practically from my doorstep - bigotry - Right-wing bigotry at that - ruined my parents and grandparents' lives.) I just wanted to write a story that challenged readers by making them look at people and things in a new light - that they could become better or worse people when thrust into entirely different circumstances, that there are world out there where only a few changes could make a Satan of a saint and vice versa. Basically, I wanted to turn darkness into grey, because if something is grey, you can understand it better and prevent it from happening again. In short, I wanted people to feel about these fictional representations of real life characters like I feel about Paisley.

My issue is that i believe there are some unfortunate implicationd on the way the author handled the issue of decolonisation and didn't truly understand what Fascism actually is and rapresents.

multiple successful first world nations in Africa that definitively prove Anti-Black racists wrong when they say a Black country is doomed to fail. In fact, it is precisely this fact that makes Ian Smith realise the folly of his politics and move to moderate.

2) Multiple African states have consolidated into serious geopolitical players and played the overwhelming role in ending certain colonial presences in Africa by their hands alone.

Oh no, i am sure you didn’t realise the unfortunate implications that a reader can found in your handling of decolonisation and fascism but unfortunately there are quite a few of them.

For example the Congo. You pointed this out as one of the examples that your timeline does not glorify colonial empires. Except that the Congo in FoM didn't collapse because of the Belgians, did it? It collapsed because you made Patrice Lumumba a Marxist. You obviously didn’t bother to explain why Lumumba in your timeline is willing to embrace communism, even though in real life he never showed any particular sympathy for the Soviet Union and that in FoM the Soviet Union has lost all legitimacy and already has abandoned its allies in the past.

Of course this is problematic enough when you consider that in real life Lumumba was literally cut into small pieces as the US was concerned that he was secretly a Communist. In FoM it almost seems to confirm that they were right to commit such a crime, that if Patrice Lumumba had lived the shadow of the Kremlin would have extended to the center of Africa.

There is also the problem of how you solved the Congo crisis: it was not solved by the Congolese but by the intervention of France through one of its puppets .. I mean allies.

So the Congo crisis in FoM was caused by the vilification of one of the best known victims of the Cold War paranoia and solved by the intervention of a European power that restored peace to a nation at war and heroically placed said country under its protective wing.

But hey Lumumba isn't the only one to have suffered a similar fate in FoM.

After all, what you wrote about Rhodesia is another glaring problem with your timeline. You see, unlike Ian Paisley, Ian Smith, he never repented for what he did, did he? Even in his final days he has always maintained that the defense of his eighteenth-century racial ideas was more than enough to justify all the chaos, death and violence that occurred under his rule.

In FoM, however, this man is suddenly sane, presented as a reasonable authority figure who obviously hopes to find a peaceful solution with the rebels.

Meanwhile Mugabe is the same asshole as OTL and all the other rebels who in OTL opposed him and his policies are either dead, inexistent or completely willing to collaborate with Ian Smith to create a better future.

But hey the way you talked about it at least the Europeans suffered severe repercussions for their actions right? Except it didn't happen.

I still remember discussions of how De Gaulle's decision to use an atomic bomb against the FNL would have probably made the war in Algeria even more brutal, but in the end there was no consequence.

As in Vietnam, France simply killed a few individuals in particular and suddenly the war was won, with all the other resistance groups completely disappearing.

And what about Africa under fascist rule? Libya and Morocco are perfectly integrated with no protests and resistance with almost no explanation outside of "Rome and Madrid send more and more of their citizens to live in colonies" and "the natives are treated with respect" (forget the fact that historically this would have been contrary to the founding principles of Italy and Spain's governments) and only Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia were in a worse situation than OTL because of the Roman Alliance. In fact, Ethiopia is the only one of these examples to achieve independence and the only country in all of Africa whose independence leaders were not vilified or non-existent.

Seriously if one looks at the map of Africa at the end of FoM he will notice that more or less 75% of the continent is still one way or another under European control (with most of these territories not even considering the idea of pursuing indipendence after WW2 for fearr of a fascist invasion) and that these parts of the continent are presented as the most developed.

The message seems to be more "Africans need European help to have a stable society" than "Africans can achieve greatness independently".

Oh by the way the part about Libya? I wasn't exaggerating, Mussolini was a white supremacist whose views wouldn't have been out of place at a KKK rally or on the Stormfront website. As early as 1921 he had been advocating theories of "white genocide", arguing that blacks were in the process of overtaking the number of whites through the large number of their births. His position regarding the natives of the colonies? He promoted a series of racial discrimination laws considered extremely severe even for the other European colonial powers. He literally freacked out and wrote a telegram of protest after reading a report of a non-commissioned officer playing cards with a native Eritrean.

But of course I imagine a counter-argument could be that somehow the fact that having his life saved by a fictional character may have persuaded Mussolini to abandon his racist and anti-Semitic positions (in 1919 he blamed the Jews for the Russian revolution), right? Except that this doesn’t explain why suddenly all the other colonial powers are doing the same

As for my portrayal of certain colonial leaders as being too positive, I would point out I made a Stalinist who was implicated in most of Stalin's crimes a literal saint. I made a Polish Communist dictator who killed thousands a man who defied Stalin to save his country's Jews

Of course , but it is difficult not to notice that all the historical leaders who could endanger European domination in Africa are the ones continually and constantly vilified or more simply don't exist in the timeline.

anti-Fascism (dear God I'd be executed a thousand times by now if I lived under one)

Oh, I really believe it. This is why I am surprised at how you managed to glorify fascism without realizing it.

You will obviously wonder how you did such a thing, pointing to the war crimes committed during FoM's Ethiopian War as clear evidence that this is not the case.

But the problem is, you washed away the worst aspect of fascism to tell your story.

You see the problem with your interpretation of Benito Mussolini is that he has little or nothing in common with the man who led my country in some of the most disastrous militant defeats in our history.

You know what the problem is with using massive doses of Historical Hero Upgrade with the founder of fascism? That fascism itself receives such massive doses.

You didn’t just give us a more heroic portrait of Mussolini and half of Europe's dictators of the time but also of the Fascist ideology itself.

You didn't just created a more heroic version of that wretched bald asshole who brought my country to ruin, but of all of his ideology. Suddenly, when Mussolini develops a coscience, the same happens with fascism. Suddenly this ideology shifts from the constant search for another to hate, to the sudden need to protect of Jews and other minorities. Now it would not be a problem if you did it only with Mussolini, but you did it with all the dictators allied to him, including Franco who IRL was ready to compile lists with the names of Spanish Jews to be delivered to Hitler. Suddenly all these people acquire an intense desire to protect a group particularly dear to Mussolini, even if ia lot of them in real life they were fervent anti-Semites.

You have not simply made Italy, Spain or Bulgaria more competent than OTL, but fascism itself. The economic ruin, the military disasters caused by the paranoia of the dictators towards their armies, the stagnation of cultural life caused by fascism are almost completely ignored if not for a brief mention. Suddenly, together with morality, fascism found competence. I don't think you understood the gravity of this while you were writing FoM. You probably just wanted to have a more competent Italy than usual but at the same time you also introduced the idea that fascism can work, maybe with some obstacles but it can still work.

You made sure that all of Mussolini's plans were a complete success from his military adventures to his diplomatic projects, you made sure that fascist Italy was able to develop atomic bombs and even get to the moon, without suffering from the problems and failures that plagued the USSR in OTL. You made fascism an acceptable ideology by repeatedly testifying that FoM is not treated with the same level of disgust as OTL.

All the incompetence, the corruption that afflicted Mussolini's reign here are non-existent. They certainly made themselves heard at the end of your timeline ... some thirty years after the POD.

You managed to glorify fascism without realizing it, simply by making it survive and thrive for so long.

I don't expect you to understand. I don't think it's easy to imagine the ridicule and madness that Mussolini's regime managed to achieve in our timeline long before the start of WW2. But you still ignored that incompetence or at least significantly downplayed it to tell your story.

A story about the darkest period of my country, about a small and selfish dictator whose thirst for power even led him to kill his wife and son that completely ignores what fascism has represented and still represents for some, including me. You basically turned Mussolini in a man he couldn’t and didn’t want to be for a literary exercise

I am not angry with you nor do I accuse you of having fascist sympathies (maybe monarchist sympathies are more likely) but God I am happy not to live in FoM.

When The Left Longed For Russian Political Interference​

To stop Ronald Reagan in 1984, Ted Kennedy reached out to the Soviet Union.

Dude, i should have told you the first time you used it. This is not evidence nor it is an article about Henry Wallace. It is quite iterally a very poor defence of Trump's actions regarding his deals with Russia, entirely based on Whataboutism.
We have far more researched and well written articles about Henry Wallace and a quite a few members of this site are experts or at least know a lot about him and his actions during the 1948 elections.
All of them tend to paint a very different portrayal of the man.

I also wish to point out that seeing that your timeline has basically the Republicans becoming the only party in the US and another series of plot-points (namely Churcill being able to win the 1945 elections thanks to a speech against the USSR, the number of times a monarchy is brought back or saved from its OTL end and you very much insisting that there are no political bias in FoM's take on Wallace) that seem to suggest there are aot of political bias in your portrayal of the man. I mean political bias are very normal but i think you are the very first one who has his target's dead body being destroyed and dispersed in a river.

I know this last part may be rude and/or less articulate than the other two but i am tired and honestly i have been keeping my opinion about your source regarding Wallace for a long time.

BTW i wasn't lying. FoM is very well written, but it troubes me on multiple levels.


I know a lot of people will disagree and i accept that.

 

[Sorairo]

SNIP

Hello, thank you for displaying your concerns in a laid out manner. I'll do as best I can to explain my reasonings. I can't quote directly, but I'll do my best to summarise the main points:

1) The TL glorifies/excuses Fascism by making it seem like it 'works'

Fascism dies pretty much when it did OTL (the mid 1970s), and collapses the moment ITO turns its full attention to it. It 'works' in the sense it lingers on due to the threats of foreign powers. The only reason it lasts slightly longer than Communism is because of slightly more market presence. Cuba's existence today doesn't prove Communism 'works' anymore than Fascist Italy lasting the same period of time as OTL Spain proves Fascism works. I simply take OTL's relationship with Communism (something that is considered edgy without the member necessarily being evil) and insert Non-Nazi Fascism in it instead after Communism stains itself even more than OTL. The disturbingness is the intent, not a by-product.

Secondly, I have faith in the members of this site that they know Fascism is wrong, that invasion and occupation is wrong, that race hatred and supremacy is wrong and that they are not going to be wooed into apologising for Fascist sadists because of Bulgaria getting a slightly higher GDP than under the Warsaw Pact so I'm not worried about the idea anyone's going to leave this TL, ignore the countless evils the Fascist commit and think 'Maybe Fascism isn't so bad after all'.

2) I'm being pro-colonial by having Africa be better off ITTL/little colonial resistance in certain places.

It is entirely natural that if you bring in a bunch of people from a high HDI country into an undeveloped region that the GDP is going to go up. If Ireland were still totally ruled by Britain and Britain proceeded to send millions of immigrants over, it would definitely boost the GDP, HDI and even the native Irish would inevitably be better off as a result of trade. But that would of course be as morally indefensible as what the Fascists are doing ITTL. I simply based Katanga and Biafra's success off of Botswana - keep everyone happy, avoid planned economies, avoid revenge-politics:

Higher GDP is not a moral endorsement.

On Vietnam, Indochina effectively did win independence and has essentially full control over internal affairs so there was little reason to continue fighting. Algeria descended into a civil war south of the French area due to Berberisation while Arabs in the French segment were horrendously discriminated against as well, Morocco was ruled by a despicable tyrant king who was so bad he ended the monarchy, Libya's resistance was already broken after the early 1930s but continued to an extent into the 1970s.

I didn't write long extracts about things like Libya's resistance (or for that matter about corruption in the Italian government - of which it was obviously typical for the 1930s regime) was for the same reason I didn't write long extracts about Finland's resistance to the Soviets. Not because 'they all meekly agreed to foreign rule' but because the story was covering the entire world and I had to pick and choose what to focus on.

3) I'm too lenient on the Fascist leaders and too harsh on Anti-Colonial Leftists (using Mussolini, Ian Smith, Franco and Lumumba as examples)

If there is a hell, Mussolini is in it. Franco is in it. Ian Smith is in it.

If there is a heaven, Henry Wallace is in it, Patrice Lumumba is in it.

Firstly, I definitely made mention of Franco's anti-semitism, Mussolini's views on Jews fluctuated wildly in his time in office before solidifying in hatred during the 30s and 40s (Paul Johnson's 'History of the Jews' is a great read on this), and Ian Smith literally did what he did in OTL - he signed a deal with Mugabe in OTL and had high hopes for the future. Yes, Mussolini's experience ITTL makes him someone who defines the citizen in terms of love for his nation and not just race which is exported to other Fascist groups in Europe. That's part of the reason why he changes tack on Libya.

I felt sick writing about what happened to Wallace in my timeline, because the whole point of that was to show he would have been such a GOOD President if there was no Communism. Could you imagine the absolute force for good he would have been ITTL if there was no Communism and he went full-throttle after Fascism? He is an absolutely tragic figure ITTL - you are not meant to enjoy his fate at all - I certainly didn't, but the fate itself was inevitable given the forces he had inadvertently unleashed. It was an absolute waste and that was the point I was trying to show: Wallace could have been a saint in most other timelines, but because he lived in the wrong one, he's a Satan.

Lumumba is likewise a tragically misunderstood figure ITTL - he dresses down the Belgians for what they did in the Congo, is deliberately misinterpreted to have people think he's a Communist and ultimately sees invasion by foreign powers who couldn't care less about the inhabitants. He had the moral right to do what he did, but moral rights don't matter in a world where Fascists prowl Africa. It's the ones willing to deal with the devil like Tshombe who can keep all sides of the table happy and find prosperity. I recall what Tony Blair said to John Hume when discussing why the constitutional nationalists who swore off violence weren't getting the recognition that Sinn Fein were: "The problem with you, John, is that you don't have guns".

Yes, FoM is a cruel, cruel world. Good people die misunderstood and condemned as evil, bad people die praised as heroes in their home countries, the legacy of invasions and occupations continues, evil ideologies are promoted on the streets. In short, with a few things changed around, its just like our world, and I wrote it as such.

 

[Whiteshore]

In short, with a few things changed around, its just like our world, and I wrote it as such.

On that note, I would say the world you created isn't better or worse than our world, just different in how some areas are better-off than ours and some areas are worse-off.

 

[Emperor of Pennsylvania]

You didn't just created a more heroic version of that wretched bald asshole who brought my country to ruin, but of all of his ideology. Suddenly, when Mussolini develops a coscience, the same happens with fascism. Suddenly this ideology shifts from the constant search for another to hate, to the sudden need to protect of Jews and other minorities. Now it would not be a problem if you did it only with Mussolini, but you did it with all the dictators allied to him, including Franco who IRL was ready to compile lists with the names of Spanish Jews to be delivered to Hitler.

I wouldn't say that all of Mussolini's allies suddenly gained "consciences." ITTL, Mussolini was perfectly willing to be an ally of Ante fucking Pavelic, whose OTL Ustache regime was so brutal that even the Nazi's were horrified, up until Ante Pavelic became too insane for his regime to continue existing.


If TTL Ante Pavelic hadn't nearly destroyed his own collaborator regime, he might have remained in power up until the 70s with the full backing of Italy, with all of the horrors that a longer lasting Ustache regime would entail.

You made fascism an acceptable ideology by repeatedly testifying that FoM is not treated with the same level of disgust as OTL.

Just because the public believes something is acceptable does not mean it is good. That is true in both our world and this one.

As in Vietnam, France simply killed a few individuals in particular and suddenly the war was won, with all the other resistance groups completely disappearing.

That's not true. The August Revolution never happened in Footprint of Mussolini, because the French kicked the Imperial Japanese out of Southeast Asia themselves. Without the August Revolution, the pro-independence rebels were in a significantly weaker position.

France did not win the war by just "simply killing a few individuals." Because there was no August Revolution, the odds in the First Indochina War were stacked against the Viet Minh before the war even began.

But of course I imagine a counter-argument could be that somehow the fact that having his life saved by a fictional character may have persuaded Mussolini to abandon his racist and anti-Semitic positions (in 1919 he blamed the Jews for the Russian revolution), right? Except that this doesn’t explain why suddenly all the other colonial powers are doing the same

Because, as much as Italy likes to lie that "there are no puppet states in the Roman Alliance," Italy is still the one in charge.

And what about Africa under fascist rule? Libya and Morocco are perfectly integrated with no protests and resistance

No? Morocco had a coup against their puppet monarchy, and they are still struggling with inequality between the Berber elites and the discontent Arab majority up to the present day as a result of the legacy of the failed attempt to make them submit to Fascist dominance. Morocco was most definitely not "perfectly integrated with no protests and no resistance."


As for Libya, the chances of an independent Libyan Arab state were screwed over really badly the instant the Hungarian Jews arrived and turned the Arabs into a minority in their own homeland overnight.

 

[TheDetailer]

I felt sick writing about what happened to Wallace in my timeline, because the whole point of that was to show he would have been such a GOOD President if there was no Communism. Could you imagine the absolute force for good he would have been ITTL if there was no Communism and he went full-throttle after Fascism? He is an absolutely tragic figure ITTL - you are not meant to enjoy his fate at all - I certainly didn't, but the fate itself was inevitable given the forces he had inadvertently unleashed. It was an absolute waste and that was the point I was trying to show: Wallace could have been a saint in most other timelines, but because he lived in the wrong one, he's a Satan.

Unfortunately, it seemed that some people didn't get the message, after reading the following comments after the Day of the Three Presidents.

 

[Gar48]

Yes, FoM is a cruel, cruel world. Good people die misunderstood and condemned as evil, bad people die praised as heroes in their home countries, the legacy of invasions and occupations continues, evil ideologies are promoted on the streets. In short, with a few things changed around, its just like our world, and I wrote it as such.

Ok, i apologise for having misunderstood parts of your timeline then.

I am sorry for the drama i caused and i must thank your for being patient enough to point out my mistakes. Again i really like this timeline, it is just the premise makes me kinda uncorfotable for, well, personal reasons.
My judgment was clearly clouded by said reasons . I hope i didn't offend you

 

[Kaiko]

Again i really like this timeline, it is just the premise makes me kinda uncorfotable for, well, personal reasons.

Everyone interprets works in their own way and usually a piece of art or literature is meant to make inspire a feeling or an idea into people, sometimes that feeling is discomfort.

I really found the concept to be interesting in it's exploration of western "liberal democracy" allying with fascism against Naziism, Communism, and Islamist forces along with the long term consequences that such an alliance would mean on the world.

That being said, it's not like the author is stating that the world would be better under fascism. People are very much disgusted at the actions of the fascist regimes and there are very negative consequences for the tolerance of fascism as a mainstream ideology and what it means when new nations are born into this world.

To say that this thread glorifies fascism would be like someone from the FoM world saying that our timeline glorifies Communism and makes excuses for Islamism.

 

[Lalli]

It would indeed be very foolish say that this TL would defend fascism. Not anything like that. Beside saving Jews, helping defeat nazis and saving Israel's ass twice Italy has commited terrible atrocities. Supressing democracy and human rights, creation of secret police which torutre and kill people if they feel them being threat to the system, invade independent, widely recognised nations, commiting several war crimes and even ethnic cleansings and outright genocide are not too disgustiong actins for fascists. Let see for example fate of Slovenes or what they did on colonial war in Ethiopia.

And allies of Italy weren't much better. No democracy nor human rights. And they were too happily going wage wars if they felt that.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if ITTL would be "The Black Book of Fascism" being total equalement for OTL "Blakc Book of Communism".

 

[Bookmark1995]

Lumumba is likewise a tragically misunderstood figure ITTL - he dresses down the Belgians for what they did in the Congo, is deliberately misinterpreted to have people think he's a Communist and ultimately sees invasion by foreign powers who couldn't care less about the inhabitants. He had the moral right to do what he did, but moral rights don't matter in a world where Fascists prowl Africa. It's the ones willing to deal with the devil like Tshombe who can keep all sides of the table happy and find prosperity. I recall what Tony Blair said to John Hume when discussing why the constitutional nationalists who swore off violence weren't getting the recognition that Sinn Fein were: "The problem with you, John, is that you don't have guns".

It's easy to feel bad for Lumumba: he had admirable goals for his nation, he denounced the exploitation of his country, and he suffered an absolutely monstrous fate at the hands of the Belgian mercenaries.

But this image of martyrdom ignores the fact that Lumumba, for his good qualities, was a very poor politician.

You didn't need to be a diehard Belgian racist to think that Lumumba was an arrogant blowhard. A lot of these criticisms came from his own allies in the Congolese independence movement. His famous middle-finger to Baudouin wasn't even popular among all Congolese. First of all, he gave that speech without consulting with them, essentially going behind their back. Two, a lot of them, like Kasa-Vubu wanted to remain more concilatory toward their former colonial power and were incensed with his antagonistic attitude. And three, even his own supporters felt the speech was inappropriate for what was supposed to be a hearty occassion.

And let's be real here: you should never, ever bite the hand that feeds you. And that is what Lumumba did, more or less, by sniping the Belgians still in control of his country.

And Kasa-Vubu's dismissal of him wasn't totally unwarranted: he was bringing in Soviet support.

You can pity Lumumba for the circumstances he faced, you can't lionize him and put him on a pedestal either. He was a brilliant speaker with admirable aims, but he was incapable of navigating the environment he was in.

 

[EvilJam]

I know this timeline started more than a year ago and that i should have posted my criticism far sooner, but i i have to say this for myself and to quite literally sleep well at night.

The author has already seen my criticism on another timeline but i am moving my post here to clean up the "North Star is red" from the drama i caused.

Tjis is based on @Sorario's post on "The North star is red", where he calmly explained in detail his reasoning behind the wring of FoM:



My issue is that i believe there are some unfortunate implicationd on the way the author handled the issue of decolonisation and didn't truly understand what Fascism actually is and rapresents.




Oh no, i am sure you didn’t realise the unfortunate implications that a reader can found in your handling of decolonisation and fascism but unfortunately there are quite a few of them.

For example the Congo. You pointed this out as one of the examples that your timeline does not glorify colonial empires. Except that the Congo in FoM didn't collapse because of the Belgians, did it? It collapsed because you made Patrice Lumumba a Marxist. You obviously didn’t bother to explain why Lumumba in your timeline is willing to embrace communism, even though in real life he never showed any particular sympathy for the Soviet Union and that in FoM the Soviet Union has lost all legitimacy and already has abandoned its allies in the past.

Of course this is problematic enough when you consider that in real life Lumumba was literally cut into small pieces as the US was concerned that he was secretly a Communist. In FoM it almost seems to confirm that they were right to commit such a crime, that if Patrice Lumumba had lived the shadow of the Kremlin would have extended to the center of Africa.

There is also the problem of how you solved the Congo crisis: it was not solved by the Congolese but by the intervention of France through one of its puppets .. I mean allies.

So the Congo crisis in FoM was caused by the vilification of one of the best known victims of the Cold War paranoia and solved by the intervention of a European power that restored peace to a nation at war and heroically placed said country under its protective wing.

But hey Lumumba isn't the only one to have suffered a similar fate in FoM.

After all, what you wrote about Rhodesia is another glaring problem with your timeline. You see, unlike Ian Paisley, Ian Smith, he never repented for what he did, did he? Even in his final days he has always maintained that the defense of his eighteenth-century racial ideas was more than enough to justify all the chaos, death and violence that occurred under his rule.

In FoM, however, this man is suddenly sane, presented as a reasonable authority figure who obviously hopes to find a peaceful solution with the rebels.

Meanwhile Mugabe is the same asshole as OTL and all the other rebels who in OTL opposed him and his policies are either dead, inexistent or completely willing to collaborate with Ian Smith to create a better future.

But hey the way you talked about it at least the Europeans suffered severe repercussions for their actions right? Except it didn't happen.

I still remember discussions of how De Gaulle's decision to use an atomic bomb against the FNL would have probably made the war in Algeria even more brutal, but in the end there was no consequence.

As in Vietnam, France simply killed a few individuals in particular and suddenly the war was won, with all the other resistance groups completely disappearing.

And what about Africa under fascist rule? Libya and Morocco are perfectly integrated with no protests and resistance with almost no explanation outside of "Rome and Madrid send more and more of their citizens to live in colonies" and "the natives are treated with respect" (forget the fact that historically this would have been contrary to the founding principles of Italy and Spain's governments) and only Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia were in a worse situation than OTL because of the Roman Alliance. In fact, Ethiopia is the only one of these examples to achieve independence and the only country in all of Africa whose independence leaders were not vilified or non-existent.

Seriously if one looks at the map of Africa at the end of FoM he will notice that more or less 75% of the continent is still one way or another under European control (with most of these territories not even considering the idea of pursuing indipendence after WW2 for fearr of a fascist invasion) and that these parts of the continent are presented as the most developed.

The message seems to be more "Africans need European help to have a stable society" than "Africans can achieve greatness independently".

Oh by the way the part about Libya? I wasn't exaggerating, Mussolini was a white supremacist whose views wouldn't have been out of place at a KKK rally or on the Stormfront website. As early as 1921 he had been advocating theories of "white genocide", arguing that blacks were in the process of overtaking the number of whites through the large number of their births. His position regarding the natives of the colonies? He promoted a series of racial discrimination laws considered extremely severe even for the other European colonial powers. He literally freacked out and wrote a telegram of protest after reading a report of a non-commissioned officer playing cards with a native Eritrean.

But of course I imagine a counter-argument could be that somehow the fact that having his life saved by a fictional character may have persuaded Mussolini to abandon his racist and anti-Semitic positions (in 1919 he blamed the Jews for the Russian revolution), right? Except that this doesn’t explain why suddenly all the other colonial powers are doing the same


Of course , but it is difficult not to notice that all the historical leaders who could endanger European domination in Africa are the ones continually and constantly vilified or more simply don't exist in the timeline.



Oh, I really believe it. This is why I am surprised at how you managed to glorify fascism without realizing it.

You will obviously wonder how you did such a thing, pointing to the war crimes committed during FoM's Ethiopian War as clear evidence that this is not the case.

But the problem is, you washed away the worst aspect of fascism to tell your story.

You see the problem with your interpretation of Benito Mussolini is that he has little or nothing in common with the man who led my country in some of the most disastrous militant defeats in our history.

You know what the problem is with using massive doses of Historical Hero Upgrade with the founder of fascism? That fascism itself receives such massive doses.

You didn’t just give us a more heroic portrait of Mussolini and half of Europe's dictators of the time but also of the Fascist ideology itself.

You didn't just created a more heroic version of that wretched bald asshole who brought my country to ruin, but of all of his ideology. Suddenly, when Mussolini develops a coscience, the same happens with fascism. Suddenly this ideology shifts from the constant search for another to hate, to the sudden need to protect of Jews and other minorities. Now it would not be a problem if you did it only with Mussolini, but you did it with all the dictators allied to him, including Franco who IRL was ready to compile lists with the names of Spanish Jews to be delivered to Hitler. Suddenly all these people acquire an intense desire to protect a group particularly dear to Mussolini, even if ia lot of them in real life they were fervent anti-Semites.

You have not simply made Italy, Spain or Bulgaria more competent than OTL, but fascism itself. The economic ruin, the military disasters caused by the paranoia of the dictators towards their armies, the stagnation of cultural life caused by fascism are almost completely ignored if not for a brief mention. Suddenly, together with morality, fascism found competence. I don't think you understood the gravity of this while you were writing FoM. You probably just wanted to have a more competent Italy than usual but at the same time you also introduced the idea that fascism can work, maybe with some obstacles but it can still work.

You made sure that all of Mussolini's plans were a complete success from his military adventures to his diplomatic projects, you made sure that fascist Italy was able to develop atomic bombs and even get to the moon, without suffering from the problems and failures that plagued the USSR in OTL. You made fascism an acceptable ideology by repeatedly testifying that FoM is not treated with the same level of disgust as OTL.

All the incompetence, the corruption that afflicted Mussolini's reign here are non-existent. They certainly made themselves heard at the end of your timeline ... some thirty years after the POD.

You managed to glorify fascism without realizing it, simply by making it survive and thrive for so long.

I don't expect you to understand. I don't think it's easy to imagine the ridicule and madness that Mussolini's regime managed to achieve in our timeline long before the start of WW2. But you still ignored that incompetence or at least significantly downplayed it to tell your story.

A story about the darkest period of my country, about a small and selfish dictator whose thirst for power even led him to kill his wife and son that completely ignores what fascism has represented and still represents for some, including me. You basically turned Mussolini in a man he couldn’t and didn’t want to be for a literary exercise

I am not angry with you nor do I accuse you of having fascist sympathies (maybe monarchist sympathies are more likely) but God I am happy not to live in FoM.


Dude, i should have told you the first time you used it. This is not evidence nor it is an article about Henry Wallace. It is quite iterally a very poor defence of Trump's actions regarding his deals with Russia, entirely based on Whataboutism.
We have far more researched and well written articles about Henry Wallace and a quite a few members of this site are experts or at least know a lot about him and his actions during the 1948 elections.
All of them tend to paint a very different portrayal of the man.

I also wish to point out that seeing that your timeline has basically the Republicans becoming the only party in the US and another series of plot-points (namely Churcill being able to win the 1945 elections thanks to a speech against the USSR, the number of times a monarchy is brought back or saved from its OTL end and you very much insisting that there are no political bias in FoM's take on Wallace) that seem to suggest there are aot of political bias in your portrayal of the man. I mean political bias are very normal but i think you are the very first one who has his target's dead body being destroyed and dispersed in a river.

I know this last part may be rude and/or less articulate than the other two but i am tired and honestly i have been keeping my opinion about your source regarding Wallace for a long time.

BTW i wasn't lying. FoM is very well written, but it troubes me on multiple levels.


I know a lot of people will disagree and i accept that.

One issue I see with your criticism is that "But they didn't do such a thing in OTL" is a point commonly used.

So what if they didn't OTL? This is TTL.

 

[Born in the USSA]

One issue I see with your criticism is that "But they didn't do such a thing in OTL" is a point commonly used.

So what if they didn't OTL? This is TTL.

That should be the slogan of this site 😂

 

[Gar48]

One issue I see with your criticism is that "But they didn't do such a thing in OTL" is a point commonly used.

So what if they didn't OTL? This is TTL.

Yeah, that was the weakest part of my criticism.

 

[NotBigBrother]

One issue I see with your criticism is that "But they didn't do such a thing in OTL" is a point commonly used.

So what if they didn't OTL? This is TTL.

ATL to OTL is the same as fanfiction to canon.

 

[EvilJam]

ATL to OTL is the same as fanfiction to canon.

Not really - mainly because of the pure timescale.

If you took Hitler and indoctrinated him with communist propaganda from a young age he wouldn't end up a fascist. If communism someone falls in the 1950s then future communist leaders of the 1970s will be utterly unrecognisable.

 

[EvilJam]

Yeah, that was the weakest part of my criticism.

I completely understand you're criticism, it was well written and addressed a genuine understandable concern.

Definitely points where I thought "that's a lot of dead people of a specific race" - not trying to insinuate anything, I am aware why the author wrote what he did and that it is in no way to do with race.