What would Las Vegas be like if America was Communist?

Mass murder of well everyone for failing to live up to the standards of the movement, not just the groups listed.

Based on what? Seriously, why should communist America be particularly suited to kill more Americans than even existed? Killing "flawed communists" never amounted to a giant body count in any communist country. Why is the US so bound to hunt for "flawed communists" in a way which kills more Americans than exist? Your idea of communist America seems as realistic as an idea of communist America which fulfills "true communism" and is an utter paradise for everyone there. We know what American communists could do based on what more "moderate" American politicians actually did regarding machine politics. Get more extreme and more people die, but eventually people fall in line since they don't want to die and see an opportunity for power.
 
Based on what? Seriously, why should communist America be particularly suited to kill more Americans than even existed? Killing "flawed communists" never amounted to a giant body count in any communist country. Why is the US so bound to hunt for "flawed communists" in a way which kills more Americans than exist? Your idea of communist America seems as realistic as an idea of communist America which fulfills "true communism" and is an utter paradise for everyone there. We know what American communists could do based on what more "moderate" American politicians actually did regarding machine politics. Get more extreme and more people die, but eventually people fall in line since they don't want to die and see an opportunity for power.
American culture's tendency towards holiness spirals and witch hunts is why. Easier to see a Red US that ends within 20 years with less than 20 million surviving americans and lots of piles of skulls than it is something like Reds!.
 
American culture's tendency towards holiness spirals and witch hunts is why. Easier to see a Red US that ends within 20 years with less than 20 million surviving americans and lots of piles of skulls than it is something like Reds!.

And that argument has an insanely shaky founding, since if American culture was truly so disfunctional, there wouldn't be a United States. All sorts of American institutions from political parties to labour unions to religious denominations should have purged themselves out of existence or fragmented into insanely small groups which all hate each other, yet clearly this hasn't happened on any large scale. The American left historically had no greater tendency toward witch hunts than any other country's left did. It existed, and in the USSR it resolved into lots of bodies as started by Lenin and finished by Stalin. But compared to Stalin, there's a lot less ethnic cleansing to be conducted and a lot less targeted famines (if famines happen then they're as "natural" as a famine can be).

And the American democratic tradition (another American cultural tradition which goes back to English heritage with the Magna Carta and English Civil War) might as well as ignore many (not all) potential purges in favour of giving troublesome people insignificant fiefdoms to rule while holding them and their supporters on a leash. The illusion of democracy is preserved.
 
Yeah. Lots of destructive labor camps there for "undesirables" like blacks, irish or italians. A Red America would be one with demographics more like appalachia or the midwest before agribusiness started bringing in immigrants.
why would these 3 ethnicities be discriminated against and forced into labor camps? The Communists in 20th century America were against jim crow laws, segregation, and racism as a whole, such were most communists.
 
also i don't think witch hunts were quite as often after America gained independence, if American Culture includes a tradition of witch hunts, then in school we would of been hearing a lot more of these historical mass witch hunts, and despite what some of ya'll but think, the US education system DOES mention the bad things Americans did, and pretty early on too, like in elementary school.
 

CalBear

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Well there's class traitors, wreckers, italians, irish, dixie whites, kulaks, etc to carry out 100-150 million dead. No reason for them to stop with blacks.

Really, try being realistic instead of whitewashing what a communist regime would be like.
Play the ball not the man.
 
And what's your source? Are you reverse projecting the current polemics to the earlier years? Presentism is a big no-no in historical discussions.
A long historical tradition starting with the puritans. Nothing presentist at all aobut it.

It'd be really easy to remove this tendency in US culture -- Stuarts decide to send Irish to new england and convicts to the mid-atlantic instead of puritans and quakers to their respective regions. You'd get a simple POD that changes so much. Remember the US is the leading player in the anglosphere and more or less rules the world OTL. Take the same geographic/institutional advantages of the OTL US but remove the puritan self-righteousness of new england and South Carolina*. Even though you'd most likely get something similar to the current US, even down to being rather liberal by western/historical standards you'd change SO MUCH by removing said self-righteousness/witch hunting tendencies.

For starters you remove the one drop rule, prohibition and the general idealistic/moralistic cast to American culture. You'd get an anglican-catholic US. This is before factoring in the fact that anglophone canada ttl would end up at least initially populated by a mix of convicts/irish in a parallel to OTL's anglo canada being basically a continuation of yankeedom.

* Settled by Barbados puritans.
 
The same democratic tradition that encourages the witch hunts I was talking about.

Then why didn't the American Revolution implode as all the generals started to kill each other for not being patriotic enough? How did the US manage to win the Civil War, while the CSA held on for five years? Clearly this sudden adversity should have imploded the country. Why hasn't the US had a single military coup in history, and not a single attempted coup (Business Plot doesn't count since it wasn't even attempted) since the 1700s? Obviously this tradition of witch hunting should lead to a mindset where holier than thou military generals should have overthrown the president once or twice.

This has as much credibility as the argument that the Protestant work ethic is the key factor behind the Industrial Revolution and created modernity. You take an idea that makes a bit of sense and can be argued to play a minor factor to a ridiculous manner. Arguably worse, since "tradition of witch hunts" is incredibly vague. Can we explain Stalin or the Khmer Rouge by Russia and Cambodia's traditions of witch hunting?

also i don't think witch hunts were quite as often after America gained independence, if American Culture includes a tradition of witch hunts, then in school we would of been hearing a lot more of these historical mass witch hunts, and despite what some of ya'll but think, the US education system DOES mention the bad things Americans did, and pretty early on too, like in elementary school.

There's Salem, and, uhh...

A long historical tradition starting with the puritans. Nothing presentist at all aobut it.

It'd be really easy to remove this tendency in US culture -- Stuarts decide to send Irish to new england and convicts to the mid-atlantic instead of puritans and quakers to their respective regions. You'd get a simple POD that changes so much. Remember the US is the leading player in the anglosphere and more or less rules the world OTL. Take the same geographic/institutional advantages of the OTL US but remove the puritan self-righteousness of new england and South Carolina*. Even though you'd most likely get something similar to the current US, even down to being rather liberal by western/historical standards you'd change SO MUCH by removing said self-righteousness/witch hunting tendencies.

For starters you remove the one drop rule, prohibition and the general idealistic/moralistic cast to American culture. You'd get an anglican-catholic US. This is before factoring in the fact that anglophone canada ttl would end up at least initially populated by a mix of convicts/irish in a parallel to OTL's anglo canada being basically a continuation of yankeedom.

* Settled by Barbados puritans.

Yet Puritan Massachusetts didn't descend into an orgy of violence and purges as rival ministers all excommunicated each other while the towns all hate each other and thus prove easy pickings for the American Indians? Did purges and exiles happen? Sure did, hence Rhode Island. Or since you mention the Puritans, how did Cromwell ever win? Your logic would suggest the Commonwealth should have been a blood-soaked reign of terror where the only time they stopped killing random Englishmen was when they were killing each other. Yet outside of Ireland, the English Civil War killed less than 4% of Englishmen (50% more than World War I, akin to Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary's percentage of casualties) while the 1650s weren't full of mass murder.

Since your idea clearly makes for a poor predictor of actual historical events, why should it be applied to hypothetical events? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
 
To quote from discussion in one of the more popular AH scenarios of this type:

Great timeline! Small question, what will come of Las Vegas?

A little town with a well, in all likelihood. Don't know what natural resources are nearby though.

...Also, what is the state of gambling in the USAR? Would high-stakes poker tournaments be a thing and are their lotteries? I can't see Las Vegas being seen as a major gambling hotspot, although I am sure they can find other vices to be associated with.

...Gambling on any major level is pretty strongly prohibited. Certain institutions like horse racing persist for historical reasons, and low stakes gambling is permitted in some places, but other than that it isn't institutionalized. It's restricted to a small scale grey market and occasionally a criminal enterprise.
 
. . For starters you remove the one drop rule, prohibition and the general idealistic/moralistic cast to American culture.
You bring up good points. The one drop of blood rule regarding who’s black is pretty hardcore.

A lot of the paranoia goes back to Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676. Indentured servants did join with Bacon, but slaves did not. But the possibility of such and a few actually examples haunted the southern imagination.

PS It was a cool name for a rebellion, but Bacon himself was a bum. As well as a century later a cool date! , but the guy’s still a bum.
 
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. . this tradition of witch hunting should lead to a mindset . .
Fortunately, not military coups but there have been recent witch hunt.

The comic book scare in the 1950s. The two red scares against “communists” in the U.S., the first after WWI and the second after WWII. The whole war on drugs resulting in mass incarceration, with a lot of it based on “zero tolerance.” And the recent focusing on human trafficking. Instead of being used as a good tool against a real problem, some of it just feeds into the normal criminal justice method of hysterically overcharging so the person will plead out. Like this lady who ran an escort service in Alaska was charged with trafficking even though adult only sex workers, female-led sex business just like you’d like, and seeming evidence that she treated her escorts pretty well.

So, yes, a communist revolution ? after the panic of 1873 and the slow recovery or ? during first decade of 1900s ? certainly could spiral downward,

but I prefer in this thread to dance the possibility that things work out pretty well.

* still think we’re likely just normal people, but let’s say the paranoid side of normal :)
 
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You bring up good points. The one drop of blood rule regarding who’s black is pretty hardcore.

A lot of the paranoia goes back to Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676. Indentured servants did join with Bacon, but slaves did not. But the possibility of such and a few actually examples haunted the southern imagination.

PS It was a cool name for a rebellion, but Bacon himself was a bum. As well as a century later a cool date! , but the guy’s still a bum.
Yep. The english were the most xenophobic people, but well neither the UK or other non-US anglo colonies did the one drop rule so odds are we'd still see rising paranoia but it wouldn't get ridiculous like OTL's one drop rule.
 
It probably never develops into a major city. Even in 1950 it had less than 25,000 people, and this was after a few decades that saw a lot of people move there for the Hoover Dam construction and huge media buzz about the city.

I'd be surprised if it ever got above 50,000 in a communist America.
 
Fortunately, not military coups but there have been recent witch hunt.

The comic book scare in the 1950s. The two red scares against “communists” in the U.S., the first after WWI and the second after WWII. The whole war on drugs resulting in mass incarceration, with a lot of it based on “zero tolerance.” And the recent focusing on human trafficking. Instead of being used as a good tool against a real problem, some of it just feeds into the normal criminal justice method of hysterically overcharging so the person will plead out. Like this lady who ran an escort service in Alaska was charged with trafficking even though adult only sex workers, female-led sex business just like you’d like, and seeming evidence that she treated her escorts pretty well.

So, yes, a communist revolution ? after the panic of 1873 and the slow recovery or ? during first decade of 1900s ? certainly could spiral downward,

but I prefer in this thread to dance the possibility that things work out pretty well.

* still think we’re likely just normal people, but let’s say the paranoid side of normal :)

Examples like that aren't limited to American, Anglo, or Northern European Protestant culture. Searching "White Terror" brings up a ton of examples of anti-communist witch hunts, including those in dictatorships which produced sizable body counts. That's not even counting other anti-communist repressions not called White Terror or Red Scare, like Operation Condor in Latin America. And using violence against people perceived as a threat to your power is as old as humanity, and no doubt people overreacted many times to how great the threat actually was.

Same with moral panics like comic books, etc. Analogues exist in many cultures and it presumably has the same psychological background. Being scared comic books will corrupt your kids isn't much different than believing mobs of sex traffickers are heading to your village to abduct women (vigilante violence against this "threat" has killed many in India recently), or that your fields have been cursed by a witch in the next village, so you need to kill them. Witch hunting is serious business in parts of rural Africa, has very old roots, and yet we don't see many examples of countries violently imploding in Africa (Nguema's Equatorial Guinea, Derg Ethiopia, Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia might count) and many examples of long-lived, repressive dictatorships. All of which are more comparable to Cambodia in the 60s/70s, China in the 50s, or even 1920s USSR than an industrialized country with one of the highest GDPs in the world like the early 20th century US.

I'm not saying it absolutely couldn't happen, but it seems kind of pointless to go for extremes. It's like saying that since communist America would be a paradise on Earth with way higher standards of living for everyone than the OTL US (from day one) because communists cut out all the chaff in the government and made it work for the people, that communist Las Vegas would be way, way, way better than capitalist Las Vegas for both the people who live there (more than OTL) and for tourists (way more than OTL since there's no poverty) who visit with even bigger and cooler hotels and casinos and all.

Salem was pre-US, so not a good example

When the argument is that witch hunts are some trait engrained in the US since 1607, it's as good as any.
 
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