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AHC: More North Koreas

Uhura's Mazda

ðat þegn/þegm þussȜ
Published by SLP
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Tamaki Makaurau
In honour of the apparent detente between the Koreas, and also Donald Trump is there, I thought it might be interesting to discuss scenarios in which North Korea isn't this uniquely batshit pariah state that everyone knows at least one incredibly awful thing about.

You can interpret the moot any way you like: Communist states adopting an own-brand totalitarian ideology; awful countries that only survive because they're bankrolled by a single major power; states with a near-deified family of rulers (so, basically just if Turkmenbashi had a competent son); halves of nations in a frozen conflict with the other half; anything.

I'll get the ball rolling: Salazar lives longer, meaning that the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique take longer to resolve, meaning that the Rhodesian Bush War isn't really a thing, meaning that Rhodesia might possibly continue as a pariah state until China starts to not care about ideology and start to care quite a lot about natural resources in Africa, meaning that minority rule is subsidised by Beijing. And even if the Rhodesian aspect isn't hugely plausible, the Estado Novo might survive and retain those two colonies, whose rebel forces were on the decline in the early 70s.
 
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According to some sources if Diem had remained in power in South Vietnam then his long-term aim was to forcefully convert the country to Catholicism as a sort of theocratic cultural revolution. When you consider the importance of ancestor veneration and the three teachings in Vietnam today, after 40 years of state athiesm and the pseudo-apotheosis of Uncle Ho, it seems that the only way Diem could have brought this about was with the sort of totalitarian regime that he seemed pretty blase about setting up prior to his assassination.
 
Forgive the frivolity.

I'm trying to think of some candidates from Eastern Europe that might have held off the fall of Communism until some sugar daddy can come along.

Most seem to be no go's from the dire economic situation. I wonder about Albania but that would take someone to fill Hoxha's shoes and a lot, and I mean a lot, of sugar from China.
 
Forgive the frivolity.

I'm trying to think of some candidates from Eastern Europe that might have held off the fall of Communism until some sugar daddy can come along.

Most seem to be no go's from the dire economic situation. I wonder about Albania but that would take someone to fill Hoxha's shoes and a lot, and I mean a lot, of sugar from China.

A split Yugoslavia would be amusing, Tito vs the Monarchists.

Just needs to ensure the entire British spying establishment isn't riddled with traitors who kept insisting Tito was totally the only game in town honest comrade.
 
According to some sources if Diem had remained in power in South Vietnam then his long-term aim was to forcefully convert the country to Catholicism as a sort of theocratic cultural revolution. When you consider the importance of ancestor veneration and the three teachings in Vietnam today, after 40 years of state athiesm and the pseudo-apotheosis of Uncle Ho, it seems that the only way Diem could have brought this about was with the sort of totalitarian regime that he seemed pretty blase about setting up prior to his assassination.

What are those sources? I don’t disagree, I’m just curious.
 
Iraq could be split by communist north and capitalist south if Qasim thinks the pan-arabists are more of a threat forcing a civil war where the ICP runs North Iraq with an anglo-american backed South. Romania could fit this bill you would just need a collapsing eastern bloc that leaves the USSR and romania intact. Now that I think about it a USSR that makes up the original CIS with a finlandized Baltic and Finland could fund and back Milosevic's Yugoslavia better and that would fit the challenge better.
 
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What are those sources? I don’t disagree, I’m just curious.

I've been doing some digging to try and find you something concrete and hopefully this journal article will suffice. To be honest I think it's more likely that Diem just saw this as a way of cementing his power base, he was a brutal and corrupt dictator but arguably wouldn't have had the drive to go through with such a totalitarian reorganisation of South Vietnamese society. For the sake of the challenge let's say he manages to stay in charge long enough to build a functioning dictatorship only for one of the Nhus to then replace him.
 
Bhutan could probably be viewed similarly with a few tweaks to OTL.

If we had some weird technological breakthrough in the early 20th century that made wind or solar power viable before the Plastic Age really kicks off, Saudi Arabia and indeed the Trucial States, or any of the Arabian absolute/near-absolute monarchies could be similar.
 
Most seem to be no go's from the dire economic situation. I wonder about Albania but that would take someone to fill Hoxha's shoes and a lot, and I mean a lot, of sugar from China.
There was one American politics TL (I think it was The Biden Express) that had an earlier, alternate war in Yugoslavia and Albania being a North Korea-lite.
 
Getting Mieczysław Moczar, with his combination of hardline communism and extreme ethnic nationalism, into the Polish first secretary's chair might do it, especially if he cultivates a successor. The problem is that Romania might have been able to get away with it but Poland is too big and too important for the Soviets to ever have allowed it to go Ceausescu, so even if Moczar gets into power he would probably be constrained in how off the deep end he'd be able to go.
 
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Getting Mieczysław Moczar, with his combination of hardline communism and extreme ethnic nationalism, into the Polish first secretary's chair might do it, especially if he cultivates a successor. The problem is that Romania might have been able to get away with it but Poland is too big and too important for the Soviets to ever have allowed it to go Ceausescu, so even if Moczar gets into power he would probably be constrained in how off the deep end he'd be able to go.

That guy sounds like a Polish National Bolshevik, right there. For the USSR I could see Khrushchev dying early like in 1959 and after a while get Shelepin into power after the mid-60s. He would make the Brezhnev era look liberal and tolerant.
 
I'm always thought the idea of Iceland as a North Korea-esque totalitarian state that nobody really knows anything about would be interesting with its geographic isolation and potential for conspiracy theories over what the volcanic eruptions really are. No idea how it would come about though.
 
I'm always thought the idea of Iceland as a North Korea-esque totalitarian state that nobody really knows anything about would be interesting with its geographic isolation and potential for conspiracy theories over what the volcanic eruptions really are. No idea how it would come about though.
A brutal and polarizing independence struggle from Denmark?
 
I'm always thought the idea of Iceland as a North Korea-esque totalitarian state that nobody really knows anything about would be interesting with its geographic isolation and potential for conspiracy theories over what the volcanic eruptions really are. No idea how it would come about though.
Soviet Dominated Europe and Iceland as the last bastion of American influence in Europe leading to an Ironclad Fascist Dictatorship
 
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