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Battlehymn Republic wrote:Not to mention the British always had a soft spot for their rebellious former colonies and so didn't bother to go and stomp out the Patriots even when they had a chance in the Revolution.

Excuse me, where the hell did you get that impression? Generally, you do not commit by far the greater part of your army - even leaving aside the immense cost and logistical difficulties of sustaining as many as 60,000 troops in the Americas - to an eight-year-long war unless you're taking it very seriously indeed.

The Patriots had loads of Whig supporters in Parliament, if the British were serious they would have cracked down on the colonials from the first time they started hanging tax collectors, I mean what kind of foreign overlords let their taxmen die at the dirty hands of some settler rabble?

Stuart wrote:
I think you have the best idea there; they get formed up into independent units recruited into people's armies on the promise of getting a better deal when the war is over. Sadly, given the history of such deals, my guess is that they get shafted again

I think someone mentioned the idea of settling said stateless peoples and refugees into Heaven and any other desirable places that we might run into and then conquer. Though I must admit that it sounds a bit too similar to lebensraum idea (the part about settling your excess population onto conquered enemy land) from a point of view

Stuart wrote: The iron law of mobilization is that one builds what one has. One may modernize it and improve it but one doesn't fundamentally change it.

So, the U.S. is building M1 tanks, M2 MICVs, M109 SPGs and so on. Ships are CVN-78s, DDG-51s and LCS-1 and LCS-2s plus SSN-774s. Russians building T90s and BMP-3s/BTR-90s. British Challengers and Warriors, Germans Leopard IIs and Pumas. Other countries get stuff cascaded down to them.

Big thing will be that everything gets simplified as much as possible.

I'll do a detailed list as soon as I can get around to it

I don't suppose that it would be a more effective use of resources to simply direct the Chinese, Indians and Iranians to simply mass produce munitions rather than go about manufacturing both the ammunition and the vehicles?

Due to the emergency and the over-riding priorities they threw people off their land, ripped up anything and everything that got in the way and thoroughly alienated the local population in all three countries. That gave enormous impetus to the fundamentalist groups who played on the high-handed behavior of the allies, their own role in resisting it. Those groups also used the same incidents to discredit the socialists personified by the Russians. So, what became the socialist-nationalist groups in our timeline were stunted and much of their strength was absorbed by the fundamentalists.

These countries got a whole new modern rail system thanks to the allies, as well as all the money coming in from troops and war profitering. Wouldn't it be a net positive for the populance?

First of all, upon reviewing the thread on SA, let me say that I withdraw my words about defending Vegard, as he does not deserve to be defended. I apologize for starting this discussion in the first place.

Having said that, I believe you're still wrong on the matter of the Caliphate.

Stuart wrote:

fgalkin wrote: And therein lies the problem with the Caliphate- it's essentially the Third Reich that somehow popped into existence after the Austro-Prussian War, miraculously creating movements, institutions and attitudes where there were none. The Talibs and Al Quaeda are products of the 80s and 90s, not the 40s and 50s.

And that is plain not so. Read the history of the Iranian revolution in the early 1950s and the existance - and political importance - of fundamentalist Islamic organizations is quite apparent. The same groups were pushing the formation of Pakistan in the 1940s. Look around the Moslem world and those groups can be traced back much further - to the 1920s and 1930s in fact

The same groups? That's like saying that the Russian Old Believers are the same group as Roman Catholic Church.

The Iranian Islamists are Shiites and are inherently opposed to the Caliphate of the way you portray- the Vilayat-e Faqih is completely different from the Sunni views.

The Caliphate movement, founded by the Ottomans as an attempt to prevent their destruction after WWI, did indeed gain a measure of prominence in the Indian Raj. However, the movement collapsed in the 20s, and was virtually irrelevant henceforth. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League publically dismissed them as crazed fanatics and offered them no support. The Muslim Brotherhood, the only other pan-Islamist organization of any importance during the period has been, IIRC, largely limited to Egypt in the 40s. Nasser courted them briefly, but that ended when they realized that for all his talk, he was a secularist who had no intention of creating an Islamic state. Pan-Arabism, rather than pan-Islamism has been the order of the day.

Most important, however, is the fact that the Talibs are Wahhabis. At the time we're talking about, Wahhabism has been limited to Saudi Arabia, an utter backwards shithole with no influence until the oil crisis of the 70s. This is what I meant when I said that having a Caliphate in the 50s is like having the Third Reich in the 1860s- you're literally putting the cart before the horse.

And that is an utterly ridiculous thing to say. I'll say this again; the TBO Caliphate, its internal structure and policies are direct copies from the documented plans of the Taliban - who actually put them into force in Afghanistan - and al Queda. The points in question were written by Moslems and represented their blueprint of an ideal society.

A small sect of Muslims with no influence, at the time you describe.

You keep mentioning these Taliban documents- is there a chance I could see them, or a portion of them for myself? Unfortunately, I don't speak the language, but an English, Russian, Spanish, or French translation would be great. I am particularly interested in the section dealing with the Council of Caliphs, or the shura.

Except that your scenarios are essentially skipping links in that chain, going from "misfits and freebooters" to "global superpower" in the space of a decade.

You're missing the whole point.

Actually, you're the one missing the point of my analogy- I never had an issue with the Caliphate expanding rapidly, I was merely commenting on your previous post how it was ridiculous to assume that the American colonists would one day create a great nation. I pointed out that at that time, it WAS ridiculous, and that you're missing quite a few of the links in the historical chain of events- there's a reason why it was their descendants (and lots and lots of immigrants), rather than the colonists or the Founding Fathers who built America the Superpower.

This also is a very good point. One can make a very good argument that the history we know, our timeline, is the most probable outcome in that any deviation from it is less likely than what actually happened. So, any alternate history is by definition less probable than our timeline.

I agree completely, and this is essentially why I don't really bother with alternate history- there is no such thing. Every change, even the most minute of changes, affects the world in ways that are numerous and unpredictable. It is very hard to keep track of all the butterflies at all times, which is why so much alt-hist ends up sliding down into pure fantasy.

If Hell invades Earth what is the likely result - they get shot to pieces.

If the descriptions of Hell in canonical sources are absolutely correct and if it is completely static with no advancement whatsoever from Biblical times, then yes.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

If the descriptions of Hell in canonical sources are absolutely correct and if it is completely static with no advancement whatsoever from Biblical times, then yes.

Well we have to work off of that- any other Hell that say industrialized would probably have opened up communications with Earth.

You know, as a minor contributor to both Armageddon and TBO I could almost get annoyed by some of the comments over there. However instead I just chuckle at the fact that they criticize the quality of the writing but yet have no sense of how to spell, use grammar or punctuation properly, or use capitals in appropriate places.

The Patriots had loads of Whig supporters in Parliament, if the British were serious they would have cracked down on the colonials from the first time they started hanging tax collectors, I mean what kind of foreign overlords let their taxmen die at the dirty hands of some settler rabble?

At the time we didn't consider ourselves 'foreign overlords', or consider the colonists 'foreign', or a subject people, any more than British subjects residing in the British Isles. Indeed there was a lot of support for the grievances of the colonists to the extent that some generals in the British Army refused to serve against the rebels.

At the time we're talking about, Wahhabism has been limited to Saudi Arabia, an utter backwards shithole with no influence until the oil crisis of the 70s.

Not to mention the US role in making the Saudis what they were - Saudi Arabia became what it is now (a heavily conservative, wahhabist money bag) not just because of its oil, but because the US in large part helped developed that oil, and cultivated Saudi Arabia as a client state (which also involved looking the other way as the Saudis used their money to export Wahhabism all over the place). With the US retreating into isolationism, the Saudis are probably going to get rolled over by the Iraqis (and where's the evidence for a strong fundamentalist movement in Iraq, as opposed to Iran, at the time?).

You can't really arrive at Taliban-style politics without going through all the roots of the Taliban, which includes Saudi financing of wahhabism in the border areas, Pakistan's turn towards Islamism in the 1980s (Zia al-Huq, who was the one who actually introduced Sharia into Pakistan's law code and made a major push towards using Islam as a unifying factor in the state), and so forth. The roots were often quite literally not there in the 1950s, particularly outside Iran (and Iran was not in a position to dominate the rest of the Middle East).

Fgalkin compared it to extrapolating Nazi Germany from the Franco-Prussian War - I'd compare it more to trying to extrapolate Nazi Germany from post-1815 "Germany" (meaning the areas that eventually made up Imperial Germany). You've got some vocal advocates for a unified Germany, but they're in no position to actually take power.

Simon_Jester wrote: Yes. But it's not an utter impossibility. It's not even close. More outlandish success stories have happened, when the circumstances were right. So I think we can seriously discuss "what would have happened if the Germans had been drastically more successful, tried to carry out the basic outline of Hitler's program, and then had to try to live in a world full of the consequences?" It's not a question that needs the intervention of the Mysterious Alien Space Bats to make sense.

If their enemies had not done some very important things right, the Germans (and just about every other group of conquerors in history) would have accomplished far more than they would have in the history we know and love.

The fact that something did not happen does not mean that it could not happen, or that the possibility of it having happened can't be taken seriously. Not when we're discussing historical events driven by human decisions, rather than by the fundamental laws of nature.

So human decision is not driven by the fundamental laws of nature? What I'm saying that for a specific human decision to occur, it also requires a specific chain of events to happen.

For the Caliphate to rollover all the differences in just that one geographic region of Islam, you could potentially chalk it up to the turmoil caused by the war (one could compare them to the Taiping rebels, in their overturning of the old order, I suppose). Though I believe fgalkin is right about the formation of the Caliphate flying off a few too many cliffs, to use a rough expression.

Minor nitpick: The Japanese were rolling over the Chinese up to 1944, not 1945.

Guardsman Bass wrote:Not to mention the US role in making the Saudis what they were - Saudi Arabia became what it is now (a heavily conservative, wahhabist money bag) not just because of its oil, but because the US in large part helped developed that oil

US private interests will still want to develop that oil, and they won't have British competition.

(and where's the evidence for a strong fundamentalist movement in Iraq, as opposed to Iran, at the time?).

The Muslim Brotherhood began operating in Iraq in the 1940's and had formed a party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, that was suppressed in 1961.

If both Nazism and Communism, two of the major influences on Arab national socialism, are removed from the board, it doesn't seem implausible that Islamism would take its place.

Pakistan's turn towards Islamism in the 1980s

Pakistan is not Islamist in this althist. In fact, there is no Pakistan (or the former East Pakistan, Bangladesh). It's still part of India. There is Islamist agitation, which is hardly unrealistic, given that Muslims would be a minority in mainly Hindu India. That's led to some Islamist terrorism even in real life - and I don't mean just ISI operations in Kashmir.


Look, the point isn't that it has to be certain that this is what would happen, it just has to be plausible enough that we can accept it and enjoy the story. I think Stuart has done a reasonably good job there. The same applies to TBO. Indeed, I rather get the impression that Stuart thinks his Nazis are probably doing a bit better than they really would have done. His point, though, was to give them all the breaks that the Nazis-could-have-won wankers keep saying would have won them the war (i.e. beat the British and get all the Really Kool Uberweapons) and see where that would have taken them.

You want something really silly, then how about this scenario: The British choose as Prime Minister a guy who was fired (with excellent cause) from his position as navy minister a year and a half into the last war, had changed parties, twice, had opposed the accession of the current King, and had alienated both left and Right the last time he was in government a decade and a half earlier.

Or how about an American government breaking the law to supply the same guys who manipulated them into what Americans thought was a useless war twenty-two years earlier. What about a president with a shaky economic record running successfully for a third term. Not only that, but doing so in defiance of a tradition held since the very first president. For that matter, imagine that this president is a cripple and the press and opposition doesn't make an issue of it.

Or the Communists allying with the Nazis! Come on, who would believe that!

Stuart wrote:
Little bit, Venezuelan naval power exists but it's pretty slender. They could probably do a battalion-sized assault if they really wanted to. Honduras is hardly well-armed either. But, the nutcase running Venezuela is making threatening noises about invading Honduras so I picked it up and included it. Note it is dismissed as being a remote possibility.

Venezuela and other Latin American countries are upset about the coup in Honduras and want to restore the elected president. That is perfectly reasonable and nothing the HEA should object to if the coup happened your the Salvation verse. Also, why would you call Chavez a nutcase?

Sean Mulligan wrote: Venezuela and other Latin American countries are upset about the coup in Honduras and want to restore the elected president. That is perfectly reasonable and nothing the HEA should object to if the coup happened your the Salvation verse. Also, why would you call Chavez a nutcase?

The "coup" was legal judicial means used remove Zelaya after he tried to change the constitution via extra-judicial means.

R011 wrote:

Guardsman Bass wrote:Not to mention the US role in making the Saudis what they were - Saudi Arabia became what it is now (a heavily conservative, wahhabist money bag) not just because of its oil, but because the US in large part helped developed that oil

US private interests will still want to develop that oil, and they won't have British competition.

But Saudi Arabia won't be seeing the profits it did IRL, unless I am wrong in assuming they'll want to play hardball against a country that just TBOed Nazi Germany.

(and where's the evidence for a strong fundamentalist movement in Iraq, as opposed to Iran, at the time?).

The Muslim Brotherhood began operating in Iraq in the 1940's and had formed a party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, that was suppressed in 1961.

The Muslim Brotherhood was present in Iraq and Syria, but they were largely irrelevant there until the 60s- there's a reason why they were only suppressed in Iraq in 61.

If both Nazism and Communism, two of the major influences on Arab national socialism, are removed from the board, it doesn't seem implausible that Islamism would take its place.

Why? Islamism is a silly, anti-Western ideology. After the demonstration of the overwhelming superiority of the Western Way of War one would expect the Arabs to go the way of Turkey, not the other way around. The Arabs were not fanatics, nor were they stupid.

Pakistan's turn towards Islamism in the 1980s

Pakistan is not Islamist in this althist. In fact, there is no Pakistan (or the former East Pakistan, Bangladesh). It's still part of India. There is Islamist agitation, which is hardly unrealistic, given that Muslims would be a minority in mainly Hindu India. That's led to some Islamist terrorism even in real life - and I don't mean just ISI operations in Kashmir.


Look, the point isn't that it has to be certain that this is what would happen, it just has to be plausible enough that we can accept it and enjoy the story. I think Stuart has done a reasonably good job there. The same applies to TBO. Indeed, I rather get the impression that Stuart thinks his Nazis are probably doing a bit better than they really would have done. His point, though, was to give them all the breaks that the Nazis-could-have-won wankers keep saying would have won them the war (i.e. beat the British and get all the Really Kool Uberweapons) and see where that would have taken them.

You want something really silly, then how about this scenario: The British choose as Prime Minister a guy who was fired (with excellent cause) from his position as navy minister a year and a half into the last war, had changed parties, twice, had opposed the accession of the current King, and had alienated both left and Right the last time he was in government a decade and a half earlier.

Or how about an American government breaking the law to supply the same guys who manipulated them into what Americans thought was a useless war twenty-two years earlier. What about a president with a shaky economic record running successfully for a third term. Not only that, but doing so in defiance of a tradition held since the very first president. For that matter, imagine that this president is a cripple and the press and opposition doesn't make an issue of it.

Or the Communists allying with the Nazis! Come on, who would believe that!

Now you're just cherry-picking facts to create implausibility where there is none, essentially descending to the level of chain-mails like these

TWO TOUGH QUESTIONS

Question 1: If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids
already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally
retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion?

Read the next question before looking at the answer for this one.

Question 2: It is time to elect a new world leader, and only your vote
counts. Here are the facts about the three leading candidates.

Candidate A: Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists.
He's had two Mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10
martinis a day.

Candidate B He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used
opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

Candidate C He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an
occasional beer and never cheated on his wife.

Which of these candidates would be your choice? Decide first, no peeking,
then scroll down for the answer.

It's annoying and intellectually dishonest, so please don't do it anymore.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Simon_Jester wrote:On the contrary, in a world not all that different from ours, the Nazis' plans might very well have worked. If Russia had not been so resistant to conquest (say, if the Russian Civil War had dragged out longer and weakened them even more, or if someone had managed to assassinate Stalin and create a power vacuum at the top), if Germany had been a bit stronger, if the democracies had not been as dedicated to holding their ground as they were historically... it could have worked.

"The democracies" were "dedicated"? To what?

"Germany" being a bit stronger? How? With total mobilization? A lot more people would die, but Germany would still end up horrifically defeated. America would take more of the fighting, that's for sure, but the end is in any case inevitably similar to reality. Damn, fgalkin already did a better job at demolishing this silliness than I'd do, so I'll leave you to ponder why no one here takes these ideas seriously.

German "plans" constituted massive destruction of other people and recolonization, and they might have done the former but the latter was beyond them; and a peace is unlikely even if Germany manages to destroy most of USSR's occupied population.

Stuart wrote:After all, Germany? The beacon of light, civilization and philosophy throughout the 19th century suddenly going completely bonkers and slaughtering tens of millions of people? Completely absurd.

Yeah, yeah. Usual, typical Western snobbery I see. It's smell is... everywhere. "Beacon of light, civilization and philosophy" that spawned Protestantism? Whose key figure, Martin Luther, the most influentical Christian theologian of Germany, basically formed a culture of hatred of Jews, and spread his deeply racist and also classist ("slaughter peasants like dogs") teachings to that "beacon of light" known as Germany?

"Bonkers"? The Third Reich was not some sort of "abberation", it was an example of extreme brutality that was formed by cultural evolution of Germany in prior years. Germany was never any sort of "beacon of light", no matter how one would want to display it. It was just incredibly brutal compared to others who were "normally" brutal for their time, but it evolved amongst a generally imperialist world, where racism and national opression were commonplace; only extermination differed Germany from the rest, and it was willing to go that extra mile because it's culture has devolved towards such violence, but all the ingredients for Nazism were already there when Germany existed in the XIX and early XX century.

The truth is that the West is not "enlightened" any more than other nations; being more rich and industrialized does not necessarily make you less brutal and destructive, and that's the lesson of Germany, not some sort of a "freak accident". History knows no "freak accidents". All is logical; everything is materialistic, and all that occurs in the future is a result of the past.

Now, I don't think the Caliphate is a good idea, but presenting Germany as an example of "unrealistic" state which turned to barbarism from some sort of "beacon of light" is just preposterous.

Heh, I guess my theory of history is that it's not shaped by freak occurences, but instead by larger laws of economic and social evolution. Individual role in history is small. Hitler was a manifestation of Nazism, but just that and not much more; his circle of power and even the very society of Germany were so deeply racist that frankly, Nazism might have evolved even without Hitler; maybe it would have been milder or more radical, who knows, but the ingredients and the historical dynamic that set Nazism in place were already there, and some form of Nazism would evolve.

R011 wrote:

Guardsman Bass wrote:Not to mention the US role in making the Saudis what they were - Saudi Arabia became what it is now (a heavily conservative, wahhabist money bag) not just because of its oil, but because the US in large part helped developed that oil

US private interests will still want to develop that oil, and they won't have British competition.

(and where's the evidence for a strong fundamentalist movement in Iraq, as opposed to Iran, at the time?).

The Muslim Brotherhood began operating in Iraq in the 1940's and had formed a party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, that was suppressed in 1961. [/Fg]

But were they in a position to actually topple the Iraqi government present? As Fgalkin mentioned, the area just got a massive sign of western power in the form of the TBO bombing - one would think their first impulse would be to try to re-orient themselves towards it, sort of like how the regimes in the area vaccillated between the US and the Soviets until the US started seriously backing Israel in real life. It's not like there's - no - political philosophy in the area other than socialism/communism, and Islamism.

If both Nazism and Communism, two of the major influences on Arab national socialism, are removed from the board, it doesn't seem implausible that Islamism would take its place.

There's still secular Arab nationalism, which was a potent force in the region until the 1960s and 1970s.

Pakistan's turn towards Islamism in the 1980s

Pakistan is not Islamist in this althist. In fact, there is no Pakistan (or the former East Pakistan, Bangladesh). It's still part of India. There is Islamist agitation, which is hardly unrealistic, given that Muslims would be a minority in mainly Hindu India. That's led to some Islamist terrorism even in real life - and I don't mean just ISI operations in Kashmir.

You're missing the point. I pointed out Pakistan's turn to greater Islamism under Zia in the 1980s as part of a sequence of steps that ultimately led to the rise of the Taliban. Are you disputing that?

Look, the point isn't that it has to be certain that this is what would happen, it just has to be plausible enough that we can accept it and enjoy the story. I think Stuart has done a reasonably good job there. The same applies to TBO. Indeed, I rather get the impression that Stuart thinks his Nazis are probably doing a bit better than they really would have done. His point, though, was to give them all the breaks that the Nazis-could-have-won wankers keep saying would have won them the war (i.e. beat the British and get all the Really Kool Uberweapons) and see where that would have taken them.

That's what Fgalkin (and to a lesser extent, me) have just pointed out - it's implausible to the degree that you notice it whenever you read it.

You want something really silly, then how about this scenario: The British choose as Prime Minister a guy who was fired (with excellent cause) from his position as navy minister a year and a half into the last war, had changed parties, twice, had opposed the accession of the current King, and had alienated both left and Right the last time he was in government a decade and a half earlier.

Not as many hoops to jump through.

Or the Communists allying with the Nazis! Come on, who would believe that!

If by "allying" you mean "temporary peace so we can both re-arm and carve Poland before going at each other".

Very true, Stas, but he does have a point of sorts- until WWI, such atrocities were unthinkable against other Europeans, particularly civilians. They were, of course, perfectly fine against the natives in whatever country they were trying to colonize at the moment.

I am hardly a proponent of the Great Man in History view, but I do think that you are discounting the role of the individual. History is largely shaped by historical trends, but the individuals brought to the forefront by these currents are often ones who make or break them. Would Germany turn Nazi without Hitler? Most likely? Would it still try to take on the whole world at the same time, all the while exterminating millions, or would it settle for more limited goals like, say, Franco's Spain?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

fgalkin wrote:But Saudi Arabia won't be seeing the profits it did IRL,

Actually, they were seeing a fairly large amount of money before 1973. There's no reason to think that would stop.

The Muslim Brotherhood was present in Iraq and Syria, but they were largely irrelevant there until the 60s

Apparently they were stronger in Stuart's world. You haven't yet explained why that could not be so in the very changed circumstances of this very different world.

Islamism is a silly, anti-Western ideology.

One with rather deep roots within the Muslim world.

The Arabs were not fanatics, nor were they stupid.

In real life, Arab governments have shown a propensity to be both.

After the demonstration of the overwhelming superiority of the Western Way of War one would expect the Arabs to go the way of Turkey

They didn't in real life, why should they now?

Now you're just cherry-picking facts to create implausibility where there is none

Come now. Churchill as Prime Minister? Who would have thought that a remote possibility in 1937? I can't see a contemporary audience believing that FDR could be a four term president if he hadn't been. Who would have thought on 23 August 1939 that Stalin would ally with Hitler?

Tell me those were plausible until they happened.

R011 wrote:One with rather deep roots within the Muslim world.

Modern Wahhabism (the umbrella and roots of all modern radical islam), which is the only ideology militant enough to replace Arab nationalism and still create a militaristic state that one could call a power, traces back to XIX century actually.

R011 wrote:In real life, Arab governments have shown a propensity to be both.

Wahhabism has not spread amongst Arab governments IRL. On the contrary, non-Arab nations were the most susceptible (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, et cetra).

R011 wrote:Who would have thought on 23 August 1939 that Stalin would ally with Hitler?

Don't be a moron. War planners in Britain and France knew this shit was coming since the Soviet-Franco-British tripartite talks miserably failed.

Guardsman Bass wrote:But were they in a position to actually topple the Iraqi government present?

Not historically. This isn't that history though.

There's still secular Arab nationalism,

Which was pretty much an Arabized version of European ideologies that have been very seriously trashed in TBO.

as part of a sequence of steps that ultimately led to the rise of the Taliban. Are you disputing that?

Nope, but the Caliphate isn't the Taliban, even if they share a common ideology, and there has always been a very strong undercurrent of Islamism amongst the tribesmen of that area.

it's implausible to the degree that you notice it whenever you read it.

You mean it's implausible to you for reasons that other people find insufficient.

If by "allying" you mean "temporary peace so we can both re-arm and carve Poland before going at each other".

And the rest of eastern Europe as well as trade agreements and support for each others military endeavours. Germany, for instance, would not let Hungary or Italy send military aid tio Finland while the COMINTERN propagandized against involvement in an Imperialist War. As far as the USSR knew on June 21, 1941, that alliance was still in effect.

Pelranius wrote:I think someone mentioned the idea of settling said stateless peoples and refugees into Heaven and any other desirable places that we might run into and then conquer. Though I must admit that it sounds a bit too similar to lebensraum idea (the part about settling your excess population onto conquered enemy land) from a point of view

Thing is, lebensraum wouldn't be such a common idea if it didn't work. Moreover, given the demographics, it seems likely that Heaven is underpopulated compared to Hell, and even Hell has large tracts of relatively unoccupied real estate. Unless Heaven is about two orders of magnitude smaller, there will be spare room for colonization without having to forcibly resettle large populations.

I don't suppose that it would be a more effective use of resources to simply direct the Chinese, Indians and Iranians to simply mass produce munitions rather than go about manufacturing both the ammunition and the vehicles?

Historically, the key to rapid military vehicle production (at least in terms of the chassis and such) is rapid civilian vehicle production. There's a reason that the US supplied so many trucks and tanks to both itself and the British and Soviet armies; in 1940 Detroit was already one of the world's leading producers of motor vehicles.

That kind of retooling takes time, but I'd expect to see the numerous auto factories in the Far East being repurposed for military vehicles as much as possible.
________

ray245 wrote:So human decision is not driven by the fundamental laws of nature? What I'm saying that for a specific human decision to occur, it also requires a specific chain of events to happen.

To an extent that's true, but human behavior is chaotic in the literal sense: very minor changes in the starting conditions that could very easily have happened will produce major changes in final conditions.

Example: in 1931 Winston Churchill got hit by a car. He was seriously injured; what if he'd been killed? Yes, the war would have happened anyway, yes the British would have gotten involved. Churchill's effect on the war was not unlimited. But it wasn't zero, either. Without Churchill yammering in their ears for years before the war about the threat of the Germans, and without him in particular to incorporate into the Government in 1939 and 1940, things would have been... different. Maybe not decisively different, but different enough that you'd have to be historically tone-deaf to not notice.

And if you try to tell me that Churchill couldn't have been killed in that car accident, I'm going to laugh. People, even important people, die in random accidents sometimes. It happens. And it's a statistical certainty that there have been people who could have been important, but we'll never know because they died in a random accident.
________

Of course, I recognize that that's a stereotypical "for want of a nail" argument, but that's kind of my point: such arguments cannot casually be dismissed. We know how many historical events centering on one or a few people hinged on what can only be described as luck.

Moreover, we know that in many cases the "historical causation" was not all one-sided. There were various reasons for things to happen one way, but there were also powerful forces arrayed against it that could have made it happen the other way. The only way for us to gauge which forces were stronger is to observe which forces won, but that makes for trashy arguments. The fact that an event occurred does not prove that it had a 100% probability of occurring.

So even if we ignore the cases in which individuals were (arguably) important to large-scale events, we're still faced with situations where it's unreasonable to proclaim that the historical factors that made something happen were the only factors that mattered... and that therefore exactly what happened was what was preordained to happen inevitably.
________

R011 wrote:Or the Communists allying with the Nazis! Come on, who would believe that!

To be fair, that didn't actually happen; the Communists agreed to divide the immediate spoils of Eastern Europe, and to support the Nazis to a degree, but that degree stopped well short of what we would normally call "alliance."

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Stas Bush wrote:"The democracies" were "dedicated"? To what?

Note my choice of the word "less." They could easily have been "less" dedicated to prosecuting the war. What if they'd just wandered away in 1941 and let Hitler have complete peace in the West as long as he kept trashing Commies? Rather than fighting Hitler (admittedly, to limited effect), even though they didn't particularly care for his main enemy? Rather than, in Britain's case, fighting alone for a year, when for all they knew the USSR was going to jump in on the other side and unite practically the entire industrial mass of Eurasia against them?

I'm not saying the democratic foes of Hitler were perfectly dedicated to the war they wound up in. They wasted a colossal amount of time and opportunity by being foolishly optimistic about Hitler's intentions and capabilities, and they were not alone in that. But they could very easily have been less dedicated than they actually were.

Maybe the Soviets would still have won with no more difficulty than they faced historically. Maybe the Western Allies had absolutely zero effect on the war. But I don't believe it myself, and I don't really think you do, either.

That's what I meant.
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"Germany" being a bit stronger? How? With total mobilization? A lot more people would die, but Germany would still end up horrifically defeated. America would take more of the fighting, that's for sure, but the end is in any case inevitably similar to reality.

Not saying it wasn't. Similar, but not identical. A World War II that involves Britain bowing out, or being effectively destroyed as a world power, that involves America having to gear up against Germany further than it did historically, that probably involves major nuclear bombardment of the German heartland, is going to look different from the one we actually got in a lot of ways. I can't predict all those ways, but I definitely don't believe that it couldn't have happened for any useful definition of the word "couldn't."
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Yeah, yeah. Usual, typical Western snobbery I see. It's smell is... everywhere. "Beacon of light, civilization and philosophy" that spawned Protestantism? Whose key figure, Martin Luther, the most influentical Christian theologian of Germany, basically formed a culture of hatred of Jews, and spread his deeply racist and also classist ("slaughter peasants like dogs") teachings to that "beacon of light" known as Germany?

But that's how most of Europe (Russia not excluded) thought of Germany. The idea of them going berserk and trying to conquer everybody and their cousin Fred was just... outside the context of the era. Was it expected that Germans would fight wars? Hell yes. Would they be aggressive and try to expand their influence at the expense of their neighbors? Sure. But to commit pogroms on a scale that required a whole new set of vocabulary to define it? To occupy entire nations, including a serious military powerhouse such as France, with seeming ease?

Nobody would have expected it. You could lay out events explaining how it happened, and they might say "yes, if all that happened first, I could see it happening, thank God it hasn't happened yet." But you'd have a very hard time convincing them that this is The Future, that things are inevitably going to fall out this way.

History is predictable, but imperfectly so: knowing initial conditions to a given level of precision does not allow you to predict events that happen decades or centuries later with equal precision.

So the "western snobbery" is a distraction; it's beside the point whether people who believed that were even slightly right. The relevant point is that events evolve in ways that people who are intimately familiar with current events cannot predict accurately. And if the outcomes don't seem inevitable to them, it's hard for me to believe that we can identify inevitable outcomes long after the fact. Not without a much larger sample size to derive underlying laws and effects from than history actually offers us.

Stas Bush wrote:Modern Wahhabism (the umbrella and roots of all modern radical islam), which is the only ideology militant enough to replace Arab nationalism and still create a militaristic state that one could call a power, traces back to XIX century actually.

There's always been an impulse to a strict observance of Islam, even if not quite as organized as the Muslim Brotherhood. It's only when Sharia stopped being the basis of Muslim political life in much of the Islamic world in the 19th century that a movement to restore it became viable. Do note, by the way, that the mainstream Islamist organization in much of the Arab World is the Brotherhood, not the Wahabis. They aren't synonymous

Wahhabism has not spread amongst Arab governments.

No, they invested in other forms of idiocy in this time line. Enough of their people have become Islamists to be a problem to many of those governments, though.

Don't be a moron. War planners in Britain and France knew this shit was coming since the Soviet-Franco-British tripartite talks miserably failed.

That was on 21 August 1939. Being a couple of days off doesn't really invalidate the point that a Nazi-Soviet pact was unthinkable until it happened.

That was on 21 August 1939. Being a couple of days off doesn't really invalidate the point that a Nazi-Soviet pact was unthinkable until it happened.

Why? It makes perfect sense. Germany lost the last 2 front war. They don't want to repeat that. Meanwhile the USSR wants its old buddy back on their side. The only problem is the ideologies, but given that they were... negotiable, that would not be a major problem. The catch was for Hitler they weren't negotiable and he proceded to backstab Stalin.

Simon_Jester wrote:]To be fair, that didn't actually happen; the Communists agreed to divide the immediate spoils of Eastern Europe, and to support the Nazis to a degree, but that degree stopped well short of what we would normally call "alliance."

It isn't much short of the actual alliance Germany had with Japan, for instance. It's considerably more than just splitting Poland. I think we can agree, though, that even so limited a relationships, by whatever term you prefer, was a great deal closer than anyone would have thought these two moral enemies would have arranged.

Samuel wrote:Why? It makes perfect sense. Germany lost the last 2 front war. They don't want to repeat that. Meanwhile the USSR wants its old buddy back on their side.

So, who was predicting this before the summer of 1939? They had just fought a proxy-war in Spain, and both sides were murdering dissidents and political rivals on specious grounds that they were Nazis (in the Soviet Union) or Communists (in Germany).

R011 wrote:And the rest of eastern Europe as well as trade agreements and support for each others military endeavours.

Which support? Which trade? Knowing something about the volume of Soviet-German trade and relations is necessary to even start to understand that "co-belligerents" is not the same as "allies". A "non-agression" pact is not the same as "alliance".

R011 wrote:No, they invested in other forms of idiocy in this time line.

The fact that you consider common moderate nationalism, the most common, prevailing and long-standing ideology on Earth for nigh every form of government, "idiocy", speaks lots about your mental faculties. Or rather, their nonexistence.

R011 wrote:That was on 21 August 1939. Being a couple of days off doesn't really invalidate the point that a Nazi-Soviet pact was unthinkable until it happened.

What was "unthinkable"? Dude, just a year ago France invalidated a pact with Czechoslovakia easier than taking a roadside shit. Pilsudski made a pact with Hitler to carve the nation up despite Poland itself being in danger of Germany. Nothing was "unthinkable" in pre-war days. The negotiations often failed and the exact opposite outcome was to be expected. After the failure of the Franco-British-Soviet tripartite talks, many quite well understood political logic and the viability of the M-R Pact... most notably Churchill.

Simon_Jester wrote:The idea of them going berserk and trying to conquer everybody and their cousin Fred was just... outside the context of the era.

REALLY?! And what have the industrial nations been doing just a few years ago? What were they doing in pre-war days? What was Germany's main thrust of political revanchism after World War I, "nonexistent"? Even the revanchism alone was enough to understand Germany will remilitarize (and as an industrial nation it was well able to do so), the Nazism only added the exterminatorial component to Germany's Grand Reconquista Plan.

Simon_Jester wrote:But to commit pogroms on a scale that required a whole new set of vocabulary to define it? To occupy entire nations, including a serious military powerhouse such as France, with seeming ease?

The failure of France was a military failure, which has no relation to the social, political and economic evolution of Germany. So yes, few may have predicted Germany crushing France, but the existence and the political machines of German militarism and German Nazism would exist REGARDLESS of whether Germany defeats France or not. They would still arise, since they arose due to dynamics that had nothing to do with France's performance in World War II.

Your point is irrelevant facts.