Still, he seems like the kind of fire and brimstone preacher I used to have when I was a kid.He isn't becoming dictator and politics aren't stagnant, I doubt he'll permanently kill those.
Still, he seems like the kind of fire and brimstone preacher I used to have when I was a kid.He isn't becoming dictator and politics aren't stagnant, I doubt he'll permanently kill those.
Meanwhile, the Iranians, who were opposed to the Islamists (due to the hostility of the Islamic ulema to the Iranian government), encouraged their closest ally in Europe to safeguard Italy. An agreement was quickly signed between Kuwait and Italy to protect the small province, which ironically as a conservative Sunni monarchy found common cause with the progressive Shia de-facto-republic of Iran.
I think you mean Kuwait here, unless the Islamist Iraqi state has some really funky borders.
By the way, using this map of modern Iraqi administrative divisions, could you give us a rundown of which parts of the country each faction controls after the armistice?
So basically the only thing these people agree on is "Fuck the British empire", otherwise they would gladly stab each other in an heartbeat.
Also Italy is basically going around collecting random allies. I love it.
Treating the survival of European Empires, with all the brutality and exploitation that comes with them, as good things sounds pretty horrible.
I have not read your TL, but due to this very thoughtful, honest and raw post, I intend to. Well said.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.
Thanks for the long and well put together reply. Apologies for the misunderstanding.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.
Thanks for the long and well put together reply. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
So since it's often brought up in comparison between your TL and this one, what's your thoughts on North Star's portrayal of Henry Wallace?
Wallace is often depicted as a disaster president in AH, including yours but here alongside other standard AH tropes that are subverted or deconstructed, President Wallace is depicted as flawed but ultimately not a cartoonish and unreasonable parody of himself.
If you knew that you were out of line posting this particular Text Wall in this thread, why in the Name of the Great Spaghetti Monster did you do it?SNIP
Also again i apologise to those (especially the author) who have to deal with me diverging the attention from a beautiful timeline like The North Star just to deal with something i should have done a long time ago.