That makes sense, but I had just recalled how in OTL Georgia considered seceding from the Confederate States of America , and that made me think about Georgia leaving the Soviet Union.
To Live and Die in Dixie - A Communist Confederacy TL
- Thread starter thekingsguard
- Start date
As fun as a Georgia/Georgia parallel may be, I doubt it here, given the Confederated Socialist States of America is MUCH more centralized as a result of both the state-run economy, the totalitarian needs of a communist regime, and a reaction against the instability and division of the former Confederate States of America.
It also probably helps that Georgia would be a core area of the CSSA - not just because it's a much more Deep South focused state than the larger CSA, but because Atlanta would likely be the nation's largest city, Savannah, one of its key ports, and bases in Augusta and Columbus key to its military. The capital may be Parsonsville, but the cultural heart of the CSSA would be Atlanta.
That said, I do wonder how many of these place names will change under a communist regime, especially places like Georgia, named for a literal European king, and Atlanta, named for a pagan deity. Still wondering what names might replace either... Revolution, capital of Muskogee?
Very much so - given both the centralized nature of any communist regime, and the fact there is a large, militarized, expansionist, and very eager to reclaim the South United States leering hungrily across the border.
Hell, even on that front, the CSSA defence strategy isn't too different from that of OTL Cuba or Canada: Fight tooth and nail for every inch, hope for some early victories, hope like hell our allies abroad come in time to save us from being overrun. Of course, there are some hoping for an edge to meet the USA on a more equal playing field...
BTW, I'm hoping to have the next update this weekend. Sorry for the long delay everyone.
I don't recall you talking about TTL's atomics, that's true. Although it's hard to see even a very centralized CSSA competing with other powers in that arena sans enormous outside help - and even then, I'd expect the United States to beat them to the punch (even without OTL's Manhattan Project, a more militarized USA is going to start looking earlier, too) and outdo them in production.
Honestly, that's another of those AH cliches I want to avoid, especially given I plan to make it a plot point in the novel. I'm looking into superweapons other than nuclear weapons because I want to avoid walking the same ground that was well-tread when Turtledove first did it.
Solid guess though... and if any aspiring mad scientists have some alternate superweapons suggestions, I am all ears.
So chemical or biological nasties, got it. Much more plausible anyway, since you can slap those together with a deficient industrial base. I could even see G-series nerve agents being an optimal route for the CSSA, since OTL they were discovered by accident while looking for insecticides. The CSSA might even plausibly end up with a strong chemical industry; it's a basic applied science (ties nicely into quick-and-dirty mass education), dovetails nicely with agricultural reform (chemical fertilizers to replenish cotton-depleted soil and feed the marijuana and cocaine farms, pesticides to kill malarial mosquitoes), and provides some export potential.
(A *Confederate Unit 731, on the other hand, even an Officially Egalitarian™ one, is stuff to make the heart and stomach recoil...)
(A *Confederate Unit 731, on the other hand, even an Officially Egalitarian™ one, is stuff to make the heart and stomach recoil...)
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How are homosexuals seen in TTL US, I’d imagine military attitudes may be more accepting or am I wrong on that?
So, I was thinking idly this morning about your desire to have this USA be imperfect/shown as not wholly desirable, and I hit on a good combo; law, privacy, criminal justice and social conformity.
It's even plausible, because the young men of America are going to spend formative young adult years under the UCMJ, wearing what they're told to, going where they're told to, with NCOs and officers getting into their personal possessions on the reg. So expectations of privacy are lessened, people frown at you a lot more for weird hair or clothes, and things like vice laws are stricter (when drug smuggling is the province of an actual enemy power on your doorstep, 20 years for a crappy joint is much easier to sell the public), while reasonable expectations of privacy are more narrowly defined. This is very bad for sex and gender minorities as we understand them today (although we also might see an earlier *Kinsey, with a bigger baseline thanks to military studies of homosexuality and other 'disordered sexual behavior' in the ranks).
Meanwhile, the government uses eminent domain pretty freely for border fortifications and later missile sites (Goddard is not going to remain a lone tinkerer for long in a Union that looks for an edge everywhere), the army requisitions what it damn well needs in emergencies (and emergencies are happening whenever they say they're happening, especially in border areas), the Second Amendment is understood as being firmly about organized formations subject to call-up (stricter handgun laws are a no-brainer), the Third Amendment has been revised heavily, and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are looking a little tattered after the *Espionage Act and other measures taken against Confederate and later CSSA spies and smugglers. Blowing a couple holes in the Sixth and Seventh isn't unlikely either (black sites in the Yukon Territory where CSSA spies are held indefinitely without trial).
So there's some plausible badness if you need it.
It's even plausible, because the young men of America are going to spend formative young adult years under the UCMJ, wearing what they're told to, going where they're told to, with NCOs and officers getting into their personal possessions on the reg. So expectations of privacy are lessened, people frown at you a lot more for weird hair or clothes, and things like vice laws are stricter (when drug smuggling is the province of an actual enemy power on your doorstep, 20 years for a crappy joint is much easier to sell the public), while reasonable expectations of privacy are more narrowly defined. This is very bad for sex and gender minorities as we understand them today (although we also might see an earlier *Kinsey, with a bigger baseline thanks to military studies of homosexuality and other 'disordered sexual behavior' in the ranks).
Meanwhile, the government uses eminent domain pretty freely for border fortifications and later missile sites (Goddard is not going to remain a lone tinkerer for long in a Union that looks for an edge everywhere), the army requisitions what it damn well needs in emergencies (and emergencies are happening whenever they say they're happening, especially in border areas), the Second Amendment is understood as being firmly about organized formations subject to call-up (stricter handgun laws are a no-brainer), the Third Amendment has been revised heavily, and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are looking a little tattered after the *Espionage Act and other measures taken against Confederate and later CSSA spies and smugglers. Blowing a couple holes in the Sixth and Seventh isn't unlikely either (black sites in the Yukon Territory where CSSA spies are held indefinitely without trial).
So there's some plausible badness if you need it.
Between the CSA and the CSSA, the South will be fertile ground for crackpots and pseudoscience.
I like the idea of bio/chemical nasties, but am also open to crazy mad science doomsday weapons too.
Haven't come up with a way to bring it up in universe, but I wager the USA would have a stance similar to other militarized societies like Rome or Prussia: keep it to yourself, but if you must do it, be the one on top. Its being the bottom thats seen as shameful, not being gay.
Hell, theres even American president for such, ody, with an American President: James Buchanan. Man was what passed for openly gay in the mid 1800s, and nobody much cared... his lover William Rufus King, on the other hand...
That's pretty much it for plausible nasties (I suppose really big fuel-air bombs or non-nuclear radiological weapons would work, but you'd have a hell of a time coming up with a scary - IE reliable - enough delivery mechanism). You could go with some kind of 'scalar-wave' weapon or other crank pseudoscience device (sonic weapons would be funny), but I assume you want, for narrative purposes, something that actually works.
Nerve gas could be a good terror weapon, but especially if paired with say rocketry. If you can build a rocket (say an analog for a V2) that can be launched several states away with a big enough load of the stuff to wipe out a city, that's a deadly weapon. Even if you down it, you'll still have to be heavily protected just to remove it from whatever cornfield it lands in.
The attractive thing about nerve gas is that you don't inherently need large rockets; you could plausibly pack it into a *Panzerfaust weapon and deploy it at every level from the platoon up. The bigger issue is protective gear; you need to mass-produce protective gear a good bit better than OTL's 1940s, or you need to mass-produce and issue atropine (which you will probably already be doing because of pesticide poisonings). You can test the stuff out on convicts with death sentences; nobody's going to look too closely at exactly what went into the gas chamber if they think they already know.
In a gas-and-rockets border war, the USA wins because it can lob more rockets, survive more hits, and intercept yours better; in a gas war where the agent and not the delivery mechanism is the key, you get things like gas-seeded minefields (I'd expect the CSSA to go very big on mines; *S-mines, gas mines, directional mines, flame mines, really big mines) and the aforementioned handheld rockets. Much scarier, especially if you can keep the secret of the actual agent hidden for longer.
In a gas-and-rockets border war, the USA wins because it can lob more rockets, survive more hits, and intercept yours better; in a gas war where the agent and not the delivery mechanism is the key, you get things like gas-seeded minefields (I'd expect the CSSA to go very big on mines; *S-mines, gas mines, directional mines, flame mines, really big mines) and the aforementioned handheld rockets. Much scarier, especially if you can keep the secret of the actual agent hidden for longer.
Deploying Nerve gas or any type of gas via ballistic missile is a really really good way to shovel money down a hole and never get it back. You either try and vaporize the agent on the ground in which case you kill some people locally and that's about it or you try and disperse while the airborne which might do more damage or it might go off in hard to predict ways and do diddly squat. That's on top of deploying a toxin which is being heated to several hundred degrees Celsius in transit which probably either neutralizes it or renders incapable of dispersing properly.
And on top of that, the meta issue is that whatever you can do to destroy US cities, they can do back to you sevenfold or more. Oh, you have gas missiles? We have missiles, and four-engine bombers based out of Ontario and Michigan and Nebraska, (out of range of CSSA counterstrikes, not because they can't reach it, but because the attrition over those air defenses would be horrendous), gas weapons of their own (*Lewisite, phosgene, and sulfur mustard work fine if you just use enough), probably early nuclear weapons, superiority in conventional and rocket artillery, you name it. They can make it rain, none of your airbases or missile sites are out of range of anything they want to drop on you, and you have a much smaller population.
So what's a winning strategy? Make every fucking inch of ground a hellish nightmare to take and hold, a Saarland writ large. Mix in to your jumping mines early *claymores, gas mines, flame mines, and miles and miles of dragon's teeth and ditches. Build a fleet of turretless tank destroyers that can fight buttoned up on a chemical battlefield. Chemical shells for everything from light mortars to your largest field pieces. You don't have to make it impossible to invade; you just have to make it political suicide for whatever US president tries. If the butcher's bill is high enough, that's an effective deterrent.
(I have to say I'm skeptical of any CSSA superweapon that relies on scientific and technical prowess. I could see them having good applied science, but I can't see it being a world leader in any of the fields where wunderwaffen could sprout in this time period. Something like the S-mine could be highly effective at the desired task of making invasion too expensive, especially if it's backed by a comprehensive defense strategy and a line of secret super-gasses.)
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If you haven't checked out Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, this is entering a plausible era for the CSSA to be looking like a paradise about to come. The old, corrupt, pellagra-ridden CSA is dead and buried; this is the gleaming steel future of central planning and mass production for a newly educated and politically conscious Confederate proletariat (we'll conveniently ignore that it's an order or two of magnitude poorer than OTL's American South in the same period by necessity; by the standards of the Confederate citizen of TTL it's prosperous), where everything from food to housing to education is available cheaply and distributed equally.
In the ATL 1948 the CSSA's system will appear, insofar as most outsiders can see, to be working, maybe even outperforming capitalism in some areas. Aggressive agricultural industrialization might be one of them; dietary science and public fitness might be another. Cheap, wholesome foodstuffs to replace the poor old Confederate diet of 'white foods'; sports clubs, exercise groups and spa-resorts designed to keep workers at peak efficiency, scientific dietary advice disseminated through Party periodicals and in Party-approved and assembled cookbooks like this old Soviet one: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Tasty-Healthy-Food-Cookbook/dp/0615691358 and goodies like the *Mikoyan cutlet and hematogen bars (which you wouldn't believe if I made it up).
(I'm carefully trying not to think about some of the atrocities that could be visited upon the artisanal French countryside foods I love so much OTL in TTL's European Syndicate.)
So what's a winning strategy? Make every fucking inch of ground a hellish nightmare to take and hold, a Saarland writ large. Mix in to your jumping mines early *claymores, gas mines, flame mines, and miles and miles of dragon's teeth and ditches. Build a fleet of turretless tank destroyers that can fight buttoned up on a chemical battlefield. Chemical shells for everything from light mortars to your largest field pieces. You don't have to make it impossible to invade; you just have to make it political suicide for whatever US president tries. If the butcher's bill is high enough, that's an effective deterrent.
(I have to say I'm skeptical of any CSSA superweapon that relies on scientific and technical prowess. I could see them having good applied science, but I can't see it being a world leader in any of the fields where wunderwaffen could sprout in this time period. Something like the S-mine could be highly effective at the desired task of making invasion too expensive, especially if it's backed by a comprehensive defense strategy and a line of secret super-gasses.)
EDIT:
If you haven't checked out Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, this is entering a plausible era for the CSSA to be looking like a paradise about to come. The old, corrupt, pellagra-ridden CSA is dead and buried; this is the gleaming steel future of central planning and mass production for a newly educated and politically conscious Confederate proletariat (we'll conveniently ignore that it's an order or two of magnitude poorer than OTL's American South in the same period by necessity; by the standards of the Confederate citizen of TTL it's prosperous), where everything from food to housing to education is available cheaply and distributed equally.
In the ATL 1948 the CSSA's system will appear, insofar as most outsiders can see, to be working, maybe even outperforming capitalism in some areas. Aggressive agricultural industrialization might be one of them; dietary science and public fitness might be another. Cheap, wholesome foodstuffs to replace the poor old Confederate diet of 'white foods'; sports clubs, exercise groups and spa-resorts designed to keep workers at peak efficiency, scientific dietary advice disseminated through Party periodicals and in Party-approved and assembled cookbooks like this old Soviet one: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Tasty-Healthy-Food-Cookbook/dp/0615691358 and goodies like the *Mikoyan cutlet and hematogen bars (which you wouldn't believe if I made it up).
(I'm carefully trying not to think about some of the atrocities that could be visited upon the artisanal French countryside foods I love so much OTL in TTL's European Syndicate.)
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@thekingsguard , How comes the book?
Anyway, what are the Political parties of the United States in your timeline? I assume Lincoln losses in 1864, so I'm guessing that his successor is Clement Vallandigham or Horatio Seymour. But what party banner is John C Fremont running with in the 1868 election? Still the Republicans, or a new party entirely?
Anyway, what are the Political parties of the United States in your timeline? I assume Lincoln losses in 1864, so I'm guessing that his successor is Clement Vallandigham or Horatio Seymour. But what party banner is John C Fremont running with in the 1868 election? Still the Republicans, or a new party entirely?
I do plan on having a Sons of the Confederacy play a role in the novels... mostly to be a sad, aging remnant mostly left as one of several gangs skulking about New Orleans.
Confederate mercenaries/remnants will have a similar reputation abroad to what Rhodesians did after the fall of Ian Smith. Lots of mercs and some aging remnants here and there.
The Republicans still exist... largely helped the Democratic party's base mostly leaving the Union. While I am not having Lincoln run again, I'm actually debating if Fremont wins in 68... or 64.
For everyone else, sorry for the delays.
My newspaper got bought by a hedge fund back in October... and they've been running us ragged. Today we learned why. Half our staff was laid off, yours truly included.
Expect an update later this week.
Interesting, look forward to the updates. I'd suggest 1868 honestly because after a successful war of Southern Independence, I can see the electorate turning towards the Democrats.
Oh man. I'm really sorry, I wish I could help. All I can do is hope you get a new job soon. I'm not sure who are hiring, but I'm sure somebody with your talent pulls it off. Good luck!