TL (23)Z: The Democracies are Doomed

Sir Chaos

Banned
You, my friend, are crazy :D
Total depopulation and full nuclear barrage, isn't this a nice planet to live on? :eek:

However the forced relocations and deportations to form more homegeneous nations may bring a better place to live in the long term, as ethnic-religious strife remain the top cause for wars these days.

Or it will make things a lot worse because now a lot more people can nurture grudges for being removed from their ancestral homelands.
 
Morgenthau Germany? Its even worse than that!:eek:

The nuclear WWII was icing on a dystopic cake.:D
 
XII. The Age of Scorpio (1961-1980)

In 1961, after six months of relative calm, Great Britain grants independence to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with Kashmir, its Hindu population having been expelled eastward, inside the borders of Pakistan.
The sixties began with a war in Korea between Maoists in the North and Japanese/Russian-style communists in the South, including Japanese troops, which goes on for three years before a southern victory. It is the first in a series of proxy wars that rage during that decade, generally with one side contributing soldiers or 'advisers' and the other supporting a local insurgency. The wars of this era, in brief: Cuba (US soldiers, Russian support of local communists, 1962-1964, US victory), Iran (Russian advisers supporting the local communist government against an Islamist insurgency with semi-covert British support, 1963-1966, communist victory), Nicaragua (1965-1968 US soldiers and advisers against local communists, general US success until a sudden withdrawal of troops), Indonesia (1966-1971, Australian troops and British advisers against a Japanese-supported communist insurgency, ends with armistice and partition), Afghanistan (1967-1973, Russian soldiers against an almost entirely local insurgency), an Iran-Iraq war (1969-1979, Started by Iraq, No foreign soldiers or advisers although Iran had Russian support and Iraq had British and US support, inconclusive results ended by mutual exhaustion), a French civil war (1970-1972, all great powers agree on a hands-off policy to avoid tensions. [This policy is not reached in TL (18)Z1 lines, which results ultimately in a global thermonuclear conflict], ultimate victory by a nationalist group that aligns with Spain and Italy.), Cuba again (1971-1975, limited US support against a new communist insurgency until 1972, ends with permanent US presence and ongoing manageable guerrilla activity, Indochina (1972-1979, nationalists with covert Japanese support against Maoists and Chinese advisers, with remnant Free French soldiers forming a third side. The region in question encompasses Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and had been in a low-level state of chaos since shortly after the second invasion of France during the Atomic War. Final result is a north-south partition, with a nationalist Greater Cambodia in the south and a Maoist Vietnam in the north.), and finally Haiti (1977-1981, US 'humanitarian intervention' after Russian/Cuban sponsored communist government triggers mass refuge exodus.) The phrase 'Cold War' does not become at all popular in describing these conflicts and their context; "The Chess Match" is the preferred overall term.
Joe Kennedy Jr. governs as strong anticommunist and deficit hawk, serving two terms before losing election to a Republican candidate who had previously been a mere two-bit movie actor: John Davis Lodge, and isolationist who ended the controversial Nicaraguan war and lost re-election when, as his foes had predicted, a 'domino effect' from that defeat endangered Cuba. The Democrats regained the White House with Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. (who did not marry into the Kennedy clan but was still a close ally and had been Vice President during Joe Kennedy's second term), who would serve two terms as a shrewd but cautious 'chessman'.
In 1966, the United States shocked the rest of the world by launching Scorpio, the first artificial satellite starting a space race. The development and demonstration of intercontinental-ranged missiles would prove to have a slow, calming effect on the Chess Match: the unthinkability and impermissibility of a nuclear first strike had the paradoxical effect of making deterrence by missile-delivered conventional explosives for strategic bombing extremely credible and soon all of the great powers had, in addition to their extensive second-strike nuclear arsenals, a large reserve of conventionally-armed rockets. The US was also first to successfully put a man into orbit in 1968, but the Russians leapt ahead in the lunar side of the race, sending the first humans to orbit the moon in 1971, and Cosmos-443 would have carried the first humans to the lunar surface had it not suffered a catastrophic failure during the transition to lunar orbit. This misfortune allowed the US to seize the prestige in 1972, with the Goddard IX mission.
Socially, the US remains extremely conservative in this world relative to TL(17)Z1 history. Birth Control and Abortion are judged to be a matter for the states, and remains illegal in most of the country, as does transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining one. None of the criminal justice reforms of the Warren Court are replicated here, and neither has there been any equivalent to the Great Society (although the original depression-era unemployment assistance programs have grown partially into the niche that Welfare would occupy), nor has there been a sexual revolution of any sort. The antiwar sentiment that propelled Lodge to office was based more on curmudgeonly isolationism than utopian idealism. To the extent that this sort of counterculture movement exists at all in this world, it is in Australia and New Zealand and largely ignored by the rest of the world.
 
I've just posted the metasetting that this TL was made for over here, in case anyone is curious about exactly what the numbers and Zs are supposed to mean.
 
(Almost done here...)

XIII. The End of Ideology (1981-1999)

Of course, doctrinaire communism does not, in the long term, work as an economic system in any timeline, and the combination of having a larger sphere of influence and maintaining an extreme, Stalinist hard-line actually accelerated the decline. After Molotov's death in early 1981, a divided politburo put Konstantin Chernenko into the leadership role as a compromise candidate. Several high officials in the Molotov government fled the country, defecting to the US or China, and shortly the people in power came to understand just how strained and unsustainable the Soviet Union's economy had become. Their immediate prescription, which might have bought a few months from, was to withdraw the soldiers garrisoned in Iran and Afghanistan and dramatically slash the military budget. This policy was strongly unpopular among the military, and several generals, most prominently Valentin Varennikov, rejected 'the authority of the Politburo to pursue a policy of national suicide'. The Soviet Civil War that began there would be a long and bitter affair, producing nearly as many Russian casualties as the Great Patriotic Struggle and Atomic War together. The course of the war was one of contraction, as factions holding territories distant from Russia itself gradually let go of those holdings to concentrate on the Rodina. In the end, the Warsaw pact protectorates and the East European Republics were left to their own devices and asserted independence, shifting their economies towards "Japanese-style socialism", which was an authoritarian state capitalist system in all but name, while the "'Stans" suffered civil strife of their own, driven by an Islamic Theocratic movement. Russia itself was eventually won by Varennikov, who ruled it as an impoverished, paranoid dictatorship until his assassination in 1994. Following this, the nation became a weak government with democratic forms but actual power held by a number of competing generals.
In China, communism had a failure mode more familiar to (17)Z1 scholars, with a reformist government opening the door to a revolution of higher expectations, a failure of the traditional communists to hold back this growing tide, and a promising 'new beginning' failing in a collapse to kleptocracy and raw authoritarianism, leaving Japan, which had managed to find a workable economic paradigm, as the most serious military rival to the US and Britain. Tensions worldwide dropped dramatically, since Japan's vulnerability to a concentrated conventional missile attacks made it less inclined to adventurism.
In the United States, a combination of having been entrenched for almost four decades and a settling of political fortunes to a '50/50' nation rather than the wild electoral swings of previous years meant that the bureaucracy had become by far the most important branch of the government. President Thurston Mitchell (Republican, Born in 1934, no analogs in (17)Z1 lines) was the first to not, upon election in 1980, even be granted Emergency Powers over the central issues in his campaign, Health and Human Services, because the Republicans held a Senate majority and because, due to a Neopopulist spoiler candidate, did not receive a popular vote majority. The essence of the health care issue at the time was that the entire sector was struggling due to an extremely heavy burden of regulations and government requirements. Mitchell and his party had hoped to reform those regulations, while the Bureaucracy and some Democrats preferred to nationalize the entire sector. Although no side was in favor of the maintaining the status quo, that was the end result of Mitchell's two terms.
It was during Mitchell's successor, Democrat Paul DeVore's first term that the impasse would end. DeVore was a moderate on the health issue, favoring a relaxation of regulation, but it was not that issue on which the matter turned. Rather, in the late summer of 1990, Hurricane Athena slammed into the gulf coast, striking the coast even more directly at New Orleans than (17)Z1(3)Z lines' Katrina, with similarly devastating results. The civil service, which was 100% white at the decision-making echelons, was blamed for poor response and infrastructure maintenance, and in the politics of the US at this time violations of the 'equal' part of 'separate and equal' were nearly as unacceptable as the idea of desegregation. Congress reacted to this by taking the opportunity to tighten Congressional control over the civil service. This control turned out to work in the opposite manner planned, and in the late nineties Congress appeared to be captured entirely by bureaucratic interests. Health care, along with several other highly-regulated industries, were essentially nationalized by acts of Congress. A backlash against this drove support for the Neopopulists to nearly 25%, but their actual influence on policy remained very nearly undetectable.
In the vacuum formed by the collapse of communism, new ideological movements arose throughout the world. Islamic theocratic movements became popular throughout the Middle East, threatening and in some cases overthrowing local Monarcies. These came in many varieties, both along religious-sect divisions and infused with Arab, Persian, or Turkish nationalism, and tended to consider one another as enemies. Another set of movements emerged from the New German region as Soviet influence there waned; 'returnists'. These were usually a tiny minority of the new nation, but most were willing to use terrorism and other forms of political violence to further their agenda. Returnist groups of different stripes repeatedly targeted international sporting events,the Olympic Games, which made those events into nightmares of security procedures and did not deter all of the attackers. Finally, mainly in the US and Britain, a terrorist movement that called itself 'Nihilism' (although the tenets of its documents are more akin to radical environmentalism combined with a weird Manichean atheism) inspired a number of impressionable or already deranged individuals to commit acts of terror. In the media and popular culture, these two movements were conflated into an entirely fictional bogeyman: action movie bad guys tended to be Nihilists or "German Returnists" (a point of view which no actual person seems to have held at all), and having them be revealed to have been a German war orphan by the end of the second act only stopped appearing in every other film because it quickly became a cliche.
Technological progress was slow during this period. In 1981, The US Supreme Court ruled in NBC vs Zenith that the video-tape technology had no legitimate purpose and was a tool to violate copyrights, and forced a recall of the device. Surviving units were horded by hobbyists and collectors, who were able to covertly import compatible tape from New Zealand. While the videodisc format had some early adopters, a format with a similar size and capacity to the CD was adopted for audio and video content, with a full-length movie generally requiring at least two discs. By the late nineties, a "Superdisc" format with five times the storage capacity gained widespread acceptance.
Computer architecture took a similarly strong approach to intellectual property. In business computers, the vast majority of software was delivered in cartridge form or installed to drives completely inaccessible to anyone but the manufacturer, with only limited scripting or macro languages for customization. Writing and maintaining these scripts was considered secretarial work, and so there was an increasing demand for secretaries in the 80s. This led to a mild economic boom fueled by an increase in dual-income families. Serious computer programming was a heavily licensed trade, done only in a few graduate schools and a handful of computer companies. There was no 'home computing' to speak of at all, although gaming consoles with graphics and power roughly equivalent to an Atari 5200 were introduced in the mid-90s, and by 1999, the closest thing to an internet was a US-only academic discussions tool vaguely similar to (17)Z1's usenet. Much of the consumer electronics hardware was designed and manufactured in New Zealand, which still held a slight technological edge.
 
(And that's fin. Would still love comments on improving plausibility at any stage. I'll end up doing at least one rewrite eventually, I think, if only to move the Lysenko business to the proper section.)

XIV: Current Events (2000-present)

The turn of the millennium was not a tranquil time by any means. For one thing, major businesses throughout most of the world suffered serious failures when computer records with two-digit date fields rolled over. This problem was not entirely unanticipated, but not particularly hyped in advance and there was no cadre of computer programmers available to fix systems in advance. Companies with the best Technological Secretaries did best, but those with less talented ones suffered weeks of chaos and lost income. Fortunately, world commerce was not hugely computer-dependent, and the chaos and cost of this event were almost entirely economic. Some computer manufacturers had built 'debug codes' into their machines, which were made available to Technological Secretaries during the crisis to allow them to reprogram the main code to fix the bug. These Secretaries did not forget the codes, and would become the archtype "Coders" (equivalent to TL(17)Z1 lines "Hackers") in the culture of this world, both of the 'good' 'can do miracles with the company's antiquated hardware' as well as the disgruntled cyberembezzeler variery.
In March of 2000, a group of Hebrew Returnists with support by a few wealthy American Christian extremeists managed to smuggle themselves, a red heifer, and a large quantity of explosives into Syria (which held the holy land). Their mission was discovered by the Permanent Revolutionary Council's security apparatus. The cow was taken down by snipers well outside of Al Asqa, and the members of the group's demolition team was forced to use their explosives prematurely, doing serious structural damage to the mosque but not in any sense destroying it.
The backlash after this was surprisingly muted. There was a pan-Islamic diplomatic conference which enacted an oil boycott of Novizrael, but that boycott was ineffective since it did not reach to Mexican and South American oil producers, and it was dropped after two years. The attack did diminish sympathies for Returnist rhetoric among the academic elite and general public alike down to something barely detectable, and expose a growing frustration among the most strong religious Americas, who had no particular political home since the collapse of the neopopulist party.
The middle of the decade sees a series of border squabbles throughout the Middle East, which are disruptive enough to the flow of oil to produce a serious oil shock and derail the recovery from the millennium bug recession. The bad economy persists very nearly to the present, where a recovery is under way. In Europe, Spain experiences a military coup in 2007 while France's dictator introduces reforms which create a parliamentary system before stepping down in 2004. Unfortunately, parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2008 fail to produce a stable government.
 
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