WI:accounts of modern events as scarce and flimsy as of ancient ones, most not even contemporary

Fenestella

Banned
See how much faith you need to believe what I'm about to tell you (or to accept the accounts as historical facts if they were all we have).

By 1941, the Nazy Empire (Aryan Empire according to other sources, etymologists are still debating the origin of Nazy), led by the Hitlar the Furor (Itler in other sources), had conquered numerous European countries, some within weeks, some within days.

To clear the biggest obstacle to European peace and prosperity, the Sovet Empire, led by Stalim (Stalen in other sources), Hitlar the Furor launched Operation Barbarossa (the operation was named Barbarossa because Hitlar the Furor had red beard; according to another source, because Stalim had red beard).

The Nazy Army swept across Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltics, even reached the outskirt of Moscua. Historians and enthusiasts have been debating ever since why they didn't take the city and whether they could (just like Hannibal after Cannae, or Mongols marching on Vienna).

The only events between 1942 and 1944 multiply attested in contemporary accounts (others were written decades later) are the insurgency in Stalingrad, 1942, and the ambush in Qursq, 1943.

In 1945, Hitlar's consort, née Blonde (Browne in other sources) died of food poisoning, Hitlar died of heartbreak shortly afterwards. His empire fractured.

The Nazy Empire had some of the greatest military minds in history, including Hitlar the Furor himself, Manstine (Manstayn in other sources), who never lost a battle according to some sources, and a general known as Desert Fox (real name not mentioned in the sources).
 
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OOC: well considering that Stalin's real name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (he began using 'Stalin' as an alias somewhere between 1910 and 1912)...
 
OOC: By the time he was famous, he was almost always referred to by Stalin. Given the fragmentary nature of records ITTL, the likelihood of anyone knowing his birth name (or connecting it to Stalin, if someone came across e.g. tsarist police records), seems faint. I would expect at least some mentions of the Western Allies to survive, however, given how much they produced of later records. Given that most contemporary records would have been written on acidic paper (which doesn't keep well) and copies preserved in microform (which also has preservation issues) or later digitization (which runs into issues if formats go obsolete; imagine the catastrophe if pdfs were no longer readable), a post-WWIII world actually might look a lot like this, historigraphically.
 
Given that most contemporary records would have been written on acidic paper (which doesn't keep well) and copies preserved in microform (which also has preservation issues) or later digitization (which runs into issues if formats go obsolete; imagine the catastrophe if pdfs were no longer readable), a post-WWIII world actually might look a lot like this, historigraphically.

Yeah a WWIII that involves a lot of nukes mind you, that would do the trick. No wonder why anyone wouldn't want a war like that to happen in their lifetimes and I don't blame them.
 
It kinda makes me sad that there is a possibility of something like this happening in the future, though I don't think it would happen, unless something terrible happens first of course.
 
Just a Rube makes some good points about the fragility of modern records.
Twenty years from now, the general public will not know how to read today's posts because they will lack the hardware or software to access archived internet posts.
Also consider the shallow level of news available to the general public. The shallowness of modern newspapers requires me to read local papers, National Post, Manchester Guardian, der Spiegel, Soldier of Fortune magazine, etc. because newspapers are like lawyers. At best, the tell half the story.
The OP's account sounds like it was written by an average high school student.
 
I must agree with those format problems...

Long, long ago, I hand-wired an RS-232 cable to export a bunch of word-processor files in plain-text from an Apple ][ Europlus via a 3rd-party serial card to a BBC_B Micro.

My subsequent Archimedes A410/1 read those 5.25" BBC disks, later wrote my tales to DOS format 3.5" floppies.

From there, they've migrated via '98 and XP to this Win 8.1u1 desktop and my Linx '1010' tablet running a cut-down Win'10...

AFAIR, *NOTHING* since can read my ~1980 Apple ][ floppies and, if it could, the word-processor format my beloved Apple ][ used is now lost in the mists of time. The BBC and related Archimedes word-processors are similarly lost. PCs have lost WordStar and such. More recently, I've CD-ROM encyclopedias and reference 'books' whose 'front end' programs will NOT run under anything since XP. I've several motion-sensor cameras with 16-bit format SD cards that can only be read by an old, but networked printer...

FWIW, I've heard that a cassette player (!!) connected to a PC's Mic port plus a small utility program can actually read Apple ][ tapes. Well, home-made ones, as many games etc were 'munged'...

Be interesting to compare my 3D 'Nearby Stars' data files with modern info !!
 
There's a lovely short story entitled "Letter From A Higher Critic", in which the future civilisation does still possess much of our history - but rejects most of it as obvious myth-making.
 
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