Three Wishes

Correction: he was the greatest spin doctor ever to wear a general's uniform. I'm prejudiced, I admit: my grandfather (Captain, USN) and father (Captain, US Army) both despised him and considered him a lousy senior officer. As they're the ones who taught me my early military history...
Yeah, everybody knows that. Why, without him, why would americans enter in war with Viet Nam?
Yes, he and other guys who engendered that war were certainly the worst
officers (and politicians) ever!
 
1) Mussolini never leaves the Italian Socialists or dies of a heart attack brought on by being a huge fat douchebag, subsequently allowing fascism to stay as an actual Third Way movement, rather than just right-wing totalitarianism masquerading as something good and wholesome.

2) Stalin is killed in 1925, allowing the USSR to become an actual centralized communist democracy and a major, anti-colonialist world power.

3) The Mongols don't stop at Vienna and proceed to ravage all of Europe, destroying Christendom permanently(sans Scandinavia and the British Isles). Eurasia is subsequently united under a powerful Mongol Khanate, and trade and culture begin to flourish once more across all Eurasia. Later on, the Mongols will colonize the New World, and will not have the technological ability to completely destroy most of the New World's natives, allowing native nation-states to rise up throughout Mesoamerica, the Great Lakes, and elsewhere. By 2011, the world is a peaceful patchwork of multireligious, multiethnic empires, while national boundaries are quickly beginning to mean nothing. Technology is similar to the 1950s, with some anachronisms and leaps forward. The grand global empires have begun to "outsource" competition that would otherwise explode into violence into peace competition for territory in outer space, as the Space Race begins to heat up between the Mongols, the Japanese, the Ayutthayans, the Bantu Federation, the Aztecs, the Maya, the Long House Federation, the Likan-antay (in South America), and the Polynesians.

Truly a glorious world. :)

First off, Mongols are pre-1900, so you might want to move that wish to the other thread for this sort of thing. Secondly, what is it with people thinking that the Mongols will somehow bring peace and stability if they just conquered a bit more? Want to see what happens to a land after being under Mongol rule? Look at Central Asia. Ever heard of Merv? It was once the center of civilization in Eurasia. Know why you haven't heard of it? Cause it was leveled by the Mongols, and all that knowledge and innovation and idea exchange was burned. The Mongols have done very little in the long run to foster any kind of peace.

As for the other two, eh, maybe. I could see Fascism becoming a respectable ideology (Geekhis Khan's Duce Balboa TL does an excellent job of that), but to make a democratic USSR I think you'd have to go back to the Revolution. The Bolsheviks were just too ready and willing to use violence as their first and only solution.
 
Yeah, everybody knows that. Why, without him, why would americans enter in war with Viet Nam?
Yes, he and other guys who engendered that war were certainly the worst
officers (and politicians) ever!

??? Even I don't fault Mac for Vietnam. Also, while we were on the wrong side in Vietnam, the politicians who put us there still hardly rate a "worst" rating. Bad, certainly, but worst is a tough sell.
 
1 - The BBC policy to wipe tapes in the 1960s & 1970s stopped before being carried out.. Maybe a government MP hears about it and gets the BBC rules changed in order to preserve content.

No 2 or 3.. Just this one right now..
 
1. Mao loses -- Easier PoD, from what I see, is the defeat of the communists in the Fifth Encirclement Campaign, stopping the Long March before it starts; this makes for Chiang running China after WWII, and a very different Cold War, just about undoing the US Red Scare (1949-54).

2. Stop the incarceration explosion in the US -- Some good PoDs may be stopping the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; if that doesn't work, stopping the JFK assassination could also work (making the 1960's more manageable as a whole).

3. No President Reagan -- Good, late PoD here is Ford beats Carter in 76; reason this is good is we're likely to avoid Laffler's influence (or at least dominion of the right), and keeping the momentum the 70's brought to transforming our energy economy.

BONUS: Theodore Roosevelt wins the Republican Nomination 1912 -- Worth it alone for no President Wilson...
 
Railways and tramways don't get the shaft via legislation in the rush to embrace the car and plane.

Gen Percival is a vigourous and competent general who throws himself at the task of training his army and adjusting the plans to suit his circumstances. As a result the Japanese army's offensive runs out of steam 100km from Singapore, the Sumatra invasion convoy is destroyed by Force Z and the FEF sinks a pair of IJN heavy cruisers during desultory engagements in the Indian Ocean. The entire Pacific war is changed for the better.

Ferrari builds 21 350 P4 in response to the April 1968 FIA ruling on sports car homologation, and the 350 P4 wins Le Mans in 1969.
 
BONUS: Theodore Roosevelt wins the Republican Nomination 1912 -- Worth it alone for no President Wilson...


Trouble is that that is by no means guaranteed.

It's instructive to look at the two states where Taft was not on the ballot in 1912, so that there was essentially a straight fight between Wilson and TR. California, which Taft had carried in 1908 by almost two to one, was a statistical tie, while in South Dakota there was a shift of over ten percentage points to the Democrats from 1908. A similar shift nationwide (or indeed a much smaller one) would have produced a Democratic victory even in a straight fight with TR.

If you want to get rid of Wilson there are quite a few easier ways of doing it. To give but three -

1) Wilson dies or is disabled before the 1912 Convention. What we know of his health record suggests this is entirely possible.

2) Mrs Wilson (his first wife Ellen, not Edith) dies shortly before the Convention. He will be completely prostrated, as he was when she actually died in 1914. It's probably too late for him to just quit right away, but when Clark attains a majority vote on the ninth ballot, Wilson almost certainly concedes.

3) William Jennings Bryan suffers a serious illness in 1908 (perhaps some bug picked up on his recent world tour) and cannot run for President. Whoever runs in his place loses to Taft much as he himself did. The Democrats have thus tried two men other than Bryan, and both have lost more heavily than he did in even 1900, let alone 1896. By 1912 Bryan is recovered and his supporters are raring to go. He is nominated on the first ballot.
 
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