What if our 20th century is a For All Time?

Also, remember that we're not seeing OTL as just any dystopian AH, but as FaT. That timeline wasn't just dystopian, but had a lot of wry, darkly humorous touches. Dramatic irony.
 
The Breivik attacks seem the terrible, gratuitous, and utterly wretched sort of thing out of FaT.

I was thinking about how he had U.S. politics completely insane:

-The primary story of the summer of 1955 in the US is the murder of political activist and lay minister John Birch. Birch had won a great deal of fame in the late 1940s and early 50s with his preaching of anti-Communism as a fundamental part of the Word of God, but after a public break with his partner the Reverend Billy Graham (who decided religion was more important than anti-Communism, while Birch thought that anti-Communism WAS religion.), Birch's influence declined outside of his weekly radio show and many books.

When the murder is connected to George L. Rockwell, a naval officer who read Karl Marx while recovering from wounds incurred at Sicily, a fair number of Birch's closest friends come to the conclusion that the Communists (or the Europeans; Birch's rhetoric was very nationalistic indeed.) took down America and God's great spokesman as his hour of triumph dawned. Clearly, they must band together in this time of need, in a society in the fallen leader's name.

They are a curious crew, this first generation of the John Birch Society. Manson, the UCLA junior; LaRouche, the former Trotskyite from New Hampshire, and Robert Welch, the Connecticut millionaire whose funds make everything possible. They're all quite mad, of course, but this is a season for madness in politics, it seems.

In Philadelphia, a charismatic minister with a concern for social justice exceeded only by his gigantic, gigantic ego named Jim Jones has won a special election to the city council.

This makes this year's GOP field of candidates look positively banal in comparison. However, does anyone think that by this token, having in OTL Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of the fringe (but not too fringe, just merely non-mainstream) figure Ayn Rand, who is an extremist in some ways (in the defense of liberty, LOLLLL), become fed chairman and a major economic figure kind of similar to FaT? In that someone with non-mainstream kooky ideas comes to power, causing issues down the road.

There's also Milton Friedman and the Boys from Chicago, but they were just plain neoliberals, not objectivists.
 
Was just rereading FaT right now. Would like to do a Who's Who section for OTL in same ironic tone for this silly year:

The remains of MUMMAR QADAFFI lie half-rotting in an old refrigerator at a shopping mall in Misrata, occasionally put on display by the rebel forces who toppled his regime in the NATO-led uprising. His son SAIF AL-ISLAM, caught several months later, similarly rots in prison, occasionally beaten by guards and awaiting his inevitable execution after a show trial to be reunited with his father.
 
One day I want to write the polar opposite of FaT, where everything that can possibly go well or be good becomes just so. In keeping with the idea of OTL being the FaT to that TL's OTL, it would begin with the Greatest US President Of All Time, Warren G Harding, narrowly avoiding illness in 1923.
 

Archibald

Banned
Was just rereading FaT right now. Would like to do a Who's Who section for OTL in same ironic tone for this silly year:

The remains of MUMMAR QADAFFI lie half-rotting in an old refrigerator at a shopping mall in Misrata, occasionally put on display by the rebel forces who toppled his regime in the NATO-led uprising. His son SAIF AL-ISLAM, caught several months later, similarly rots in prison, occasionally beaten by guards and awaiting his inevitable execution after a show trial to be reunited with his father.

An ordinary day of September on the east coast of the USAs, four airliners are hijacked by a handful of men armed only with knifes and cissors. After storming the cockpit they size controls of the planes. Flying at treetops and full speed they manage to sneak across the most powerful air defence system in the world , and finally crash into civilian buildings, causing 3000 deaths.

This goes to the ASB section !
 
I certainly think that for Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Africa OTL would qualify as one variety of dystopia. YMMV on whether or not post-WWII USA/EU/South America qualify for one. It's hard to see the transitions from the fall of ancient dynastic systems to the rise of totalitarianisms or the brutality that went together with the fall of colonialism and what came after it as anything but dystopia. And in particular it's really hard to see Chinese history in the 20th Century as anything short of an extreme dystopia, the fall of the Qing Empire was bad enough. The warlord era, was worse. Then comes the unrestrained horror of the Second Sino-Japanese war, then the ultimate triumph of Mao and his transition into being worse than Hitler and Stalin both....:(:eek:

For that matter it's pretty hard to argue with the conclusion that the Congo region in general has been an endless living Hell since the 1880s and Afghanistan since the start of the Great Game. :(:(
 
But guys, you have to realize that FaT did dystopia in subtle ways. For instance, WWII in of itself is not a dystopia. WWII resulting in a fascist French state afterwards is. FaT does dystopia in very particular ways. I do understand this is ultimately very subjective, though.
 
Also, remember that we're not seeing OTL as just any dystopian AH, but as FaT. That timeline wasn't just dystopian, but had a lot of wry, darkly humorous touches. Dramatic irony.

Well, there's a lot of that IOTL. To use WWII for some obvious examples: the USA's idea of not-provoking-Japan was to cut off the entirety of Japan's oil supplies. The Japanese idea of how to win friends and influence people was the Rape of Nanking (well, for a less satirical view it was a renewal of Genghis Khan politics without the military invincibility of Genghis Khan), the whole ironies of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that Germany intended to fight a war against the USSR with the UK as an ally, but wound up fighting a war with the USSR as an ally against the UK, Germany naming its war-winning campaign after the emperor who went to the Middle East, won big victories, and died and thus contributed to the ultimate fragmentation of Germany, and so on.

Too, there's several other, greater ironies from a more metahistorical perspective: the Germans were outnumbered by their enemies at every single phase of the war, in every single category. Their enemies wound up repeating the exact same mistakes over and over again. The Germans read thoroughly about 1812 but their campaign started going to shit around Smolensk and their war-winning capacity ended in front of Moscow in a Russian winter, the whole participation of Finland in WWII and how it gets almost-but-not-really conquered twice for roughly similar reasons, the dramatic inversion of US roles in both world wars, the USA's deliberate segregation policy, US embracing USW in the Pacific despite it bringing us into WWI, the Soviets losing much more dramatically than Imperial Russia ever did but winding up with half of Europe, anything with the Italian army invading something.....
 
If OTL were an ATL made here on the site, I'd think that the author had a bit of a thing for dystopias. I mean, come on. Giving corporations the same rights as people in the United States? And all this BS happening right after 8 years of hell being caused by the very party we voted back into the House two years later?

Much more dramatically than that, the author goes to detailed effort to make united Germany and the Romanov Empire big bad repressive societies, but then goes beyond the impossible to transform a second German successor state into a technologically upgraded Genghis Khan-style kleptocracy and the Russian successor state into an inversion of the idea of the Russian steamroller, both states being more similar than different, the key difference being that the author goes out of his way to show how the Soviet Union turns into a truly legitimate regime from how ghastly horrible their enemies were, repeating the exact same thing from the Russian Civil War.....where to top things off, the Soviets again outnumber all their enemies ludicrously, the campaign sees those enemies looking superficially like they're winning when they're really not, and the author sent literally everything short of an alien invasion to bring down the USSR and the thing failed.

.....

And then it falls apart in less than a year due to a reformer. :rolleyes::mad:
 
I've always thought that the last ten or twenty years have been particularly FAT-ish. IOTL, the Soviet Union Fell apart, and after a decade of prosperity (on the surface, like the 1950's of FAT a lot of things were happening that would have repercussions in the 60's) only to be disrupted by a truly ASB incident and the things done after that set ourselves on a path to dystopia.
 
Much more dramatically than that, the author goes to detailed effort to make united Germany and the Romanov Empire big bad repressive societies, but then goes beyond the impossible to transform a second German successor state into a technologically upgraded Genghis Khan-style kleptocracy and the Russian successor state into an inversion of the idea of the Russian steamroller, both states being more similar than different, the key difference being that the author goes out of his way to show how the Soviet Union turns into a truly legitimate regime from how ghastly horrible their enemies were, repeating the exact same thing from the Russian Civil War.....where to top things off, the Soviets again outnumber all their enemies ludicrously, the campaign sees those enemies looking superficially like they're winning when they're really not, and the author sent literally everything short of an alien invasion to bring down the USSR and the thing failed.

.....

And then it falls apart in less than a year due to a reformer. :rolleyes::mad:

IC: The Romanovs were far worse IOTL than ITTL.....how about the 8 million liberal reformers ordered shot to death in 1913 by order of the Orthodox Church and Mikhail II(who gained the throne in January after having his half-sister Natasha murdered)? And then the Germans weren't so pleasant either: they started WWII in OTL, too, albeit with less eugenics and not as many prison camps, as with Nazi Germany ITTL.

OOC: IMHO, the Nazis could've done a LOT worse than what they already had.......
 
Top