Under the Aegis of the White Wyrm

MAlexMatt

Banned
I don't think the US economic collapse of 1935 would take down the world economy as in OTL.

The collapse was just so utterly path dependent to OTL events that any significant divergence from the existing timeline is going to butterfly the whole thing away.

Regardless, this TL wouldn't be interesting if it concentrated on the US. What makes it interesting is the Khmer-Rouge-in-Britain spin of it all.

I mean, could you imagine the most advanced, sophisticated society in existence so utterly destroying itself? Europe tried to do so in the 1910's and 1940's, but her finger was held from the trigger. Britain ITTL has essentially blown its brains all over the wall and there's little if anything to pick up the pieces.

This is like a more realistic post-apocolyptia in miniature.
 
The collapse was just so utterly path dependent to OTL events that any significant divergence from the existing timeline is going to butterfly the whole thing away.

Well, that's just exactly the sort of thing I'd argue against. The exact nature and detailed pattern of the collapse was "path-dependent" to be sure; the tendency of global capitalism to surge up and down in drunken cycles is embedded in its very operating system.

The magnitude of the swings certainly varies, but I believe there is a certain kind of "conservation of energy" at work; the main business cycle has ticked away on a decade time scale for a couple centuries now. The magnitude of upswings and downswings seems to be modulated by more irregular factors that can be analyzed.

Decoupling the depressions so that just the USA languishes in one while Europe is on a completely different timetable would imply to me that one side or the other of the Atlantic had ceased to be properly capitalist at all; certainly the Soviet Union of OTL did not suffer from the Depression (the USSR's problems were of course legion, but they were well separated from the business cycle). A US collapse that only affects the US would mean the USA's isolationism went beyond politics and involved a lack of world trade.

But the main reason we are told about it is that it affects Britain too.


Regardless, this TL wouldn't be interesting if it concentrated on the US. What makes it interesting is the Khmer-Rouge-in-Britain spin of it all.

I mean, could you imagine the most advanced, sophisticated society in existence so utterly destroying itself? Europe tried to do so in the 1910's and 1940's, but her finger was held from the trigger. Britain ITTL has essentially blown its brains all over the wall and there's little if anything to pick up the pieces.

This is like a more realistic post-apocolyptia in miniature.

I only ask about the USA because it has become involved as of the focus period, the post-apocalyptic Britain of the 1990s. Good job I suppressed my tangents then! But with Americans occupying a small part of Britain I do wonder, what kind of Americans are they? Are they fascist themselves, or socialist, or what? About the only thing they can't be is "American Century" world-striding Americans as in OTL.
 
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