The Midnight Oil Australia ISOT, Cuito Cuanavale South Africa ISOT, and Cave of Patriarchs Israel ISOT

[raharris1973]

Disclaimer/Preamble: Here are three consecutive ISOT scenarios, in separate universes, timelines. The 'victim' or negated countries, in their modern incarnations, are not quite chosen 'at random', I mean there's enough of 'reason' for each to be a fable or to have sort of a 'twilight zone' karma element, but with all that they were pretty randomly selected, without malice, and in other scenarios I've 'buffed' these countries and given others a hard time. So not a current politics rant. Here goes:

1) 1987 - August 10: Australian rock/punk band 'Midnight releases single 'Beds Are Burning'.


The song, and its outback and aboriginal themed music video do well internationally, ascending the singles charts, reaching a peak of 6th place eventually in some Australian and UK and US charts and #1 in Canadian, New Zealand, and South African charts over the next year. Beds_Are_Burning

Capitalizing on building chart success and seeking to promote sales of their entire Diesel and Dust Album, as 1987 wraps up the band and its agents are more aggressive about its 1988 tour schedule, willing to cut short mid-summer (southern hemisphere) Christmas-New Year holiday family time to strike while hot and get touring internationally for the first time since 1985. https://www.setlist.fm/stats/concert-map/midnight-oil-53d62f9d.html?year=1988. Advance planning and sweat equity gets them their first North American tour dates in early January, in San Diego, three months ahead of when thought possible. (This is the first PoD - their first foreign tour date OTL was April 15, 1988 at San Diego State- Here it is Jan 8th, at Hollywood Palladium)

A suggestible, vapid, music-loving ASB, who really pays more attention to things said, done, and sung in Hollywood more than anywhere else on Earth, is paying close attention.

The ASB really loves the band's live rendition of 'Beds are Burning' and is moved emotionally to supernatural action during the song's signature 'Let's give it back' line. (this is the second PoD).

He instantly replaces the Australia, and New Zealand, and minor outlying islands, their airspace, and their maritime space out to the limit of their Exclusive Economic Zones, from January 8th, 1988 with those same land masses from January 8th, 1788. This is a fully Aboriginal Australia, as it was just 18 days before the arrival of the British 'First Fleet' to Botany Bay and Port Jackson/Sydney Harbor. New Zealand is a fully Maori, untouched by Europeans, New Zealand, known to natives as Aoteara.

Telecom connections to Australia and New Zealand are lost instantly. This is a simple replacement. All people vanish with the land they are on - foreign tourists, diplomats etc. in and around NZ and Australia vanish with it, Australians and New Zealanders outside their homelands in unaffected parts of the world remain.

January 9th the world goes through the day continually unable to contact Australia. Satellite photography checks observe the total lack of artificial light. Within hours multiple authorities confirm the absence of Australian and New Zealand civilization, resulting in a travel ban and cancellation of all commercial flights and transits, either before, or after, a series of crash landings of airliners have happened.

Regardless of cancellation of commercial travel, international organizations, or Australian embassies or naval forces in international waters rather soon will do a physical reconnaissance of Australia and make first contact with Aborigines.

Suspicious absence of telecoms, artificial light, pollutants, shipping, travelers, and first contact will from very early on suggest a disappearance of modern Australia and a time disjunction/displacement to pre-European contact times, or some physical effect mimicking that if not time travel itself. Further reconnaissance, overflights, satellite imagery of terrain will only confirm the absence of any western style industrial or agricultural development whatsoever in the weeks and months ahead.

This is rather distracting for the world of 1988, but not world-ending, nor economy-destroying. The world has lost a major grain producer, livestock producer, and mineral producer, making multiple commodities somewhat scarcer, the agricultural ones in particular seasons. Millions of wealthy consumers, a substantial consumer market, is vanished from the planet.

In its place are a continent full of Stone Age Aboriginal natives unattached to global market transactions, and Aoteara, with uncontacted Polynesian natives similarly unconnected to the global market.

It is likely that as much the loss of Australians and New Zealanders as consumers will hit British and Pacific Rim exporters, and the loss of the Antipodes beef, lamb, grain, iron, copper, and uranium production will raise commodity prices that major global events like the Tianamen Square crackdown, fall of the Berlin Wall and Warsaw Pact, Desert Shield/Desert Storm, fall of the USSR will all occur.

However, whatever intentions major governments or the United Nations may have of setting aside the Antipodes as nature preserves or indigenous reserves, or whatever intentions expat diplomatic, military, and citizen communities of Australians and New Zealanders may have of monopolizing the fate of their homelands, in the 35 years of history between 1988 and 2023, no power would be able to keep either of these lands under a pristine quarantine, or under a monopoly expat control, or keep interested people from around the world and nearby isolated from the lands, their resources, and their native people.

Their will be people venturing in to go for resources, whether it is considered legitimate or not, and whether any form of more legitimate authority goes to try to chase them down and extract them or not, and Aborigines and Maori will both be exposed to uptime people, uptime technologies, uptimes diseases, one would hope some medicines, and some uptime vices.

What does the 1990s and 2000s hold for Australia, New Zealand, and a world now living with suddenly indigenous, rather than 1st world, versions of these nations?

 

[raharris1973]

2) From August 1987 through March 1988 the battle, or better said, campaign of Cuito Cuanavale rages in southeastern Angola between the governing armed forces of Angola, the MPLA's FAPLA, supported by 55,000 Cuban troops and Soviet (with some East German) advisory cadre, and Southwest Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) guerrillas loyal to Sam Nujoma, seeking to liberate Namibia from South Africa, against the Angolan insurgent forces of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA and the South African Defense Forces (SADF).

Battle_of_Cuito_Cuanavale

As the campaign wraps up, both sides claim victory. UNITA forces are damaged, SADF consistently scores better kill ratios, but the South African's sanctions-hobbled air arm is often surprised by the quality/effectiveness of the enemy coalition's Soviet-backed air defense and air hardware. Mounting costs through the spring convince the South Africans that carving out a permanent sanctuary for UNITA in southeast Angola, to buffer Namibia, is not possible, and swapping out of new conscripts for veteran troops reduces SADF field effectiveness. The last SADF forces exit Angola on June 30, 1988, crossing back into Southwest Africa/Namibia, then occupied by South Africa.

At which point a random observing ASB does an inspection of the battle, South Africa of the day, Apartheid, looks ahead a few months to see the Apartheid villains in the film Lethal Weapons 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_Weapon_2, and then goes back reviewing previous centuries of South African and Southwest African history and decides its all effed up.

At which point, she decides to make the Namibia and Southwest Africa of July 1, 1988 instantly vanish, replaced by their equivalent lands from three centuries prior, July 1, 1588, prior to (routine) European contact or any colonization of the region. At most there might be a few Portuguese castaways here or there, possibly around the Angra Pequena area of Namibia, but the land areas of Namibia and South Africa are largely inhabited by Khoisan peoples in the south and west and some Bantu peoples in the far north and east.

Over the next 12-24 hours, the world notices the absence of modern communications signals from Namibia and South Africa, and the sudden absence of modern physical structures is instantly noticeable, especially on the South African-Mozambican, South African-Zimbabwean borders. As are reports of unusually large herds of elephants and other wildlife at the border.

Satellite and close-in inspection confirm the absence of modern South Africa and Namibia. Exiled liberation organizations, SWAPO for Namibia, and the ANC for South Africa, publicly stake claims for the territories, while diplomatic personnel of the South African government abroad, only represented in a subset of countries, aren't taken very seriously when they assert their continuity of claims, and most simply don't bother and simply start scattering and looking for emigration/asylum status in the western world.

The Angolan, Mozambican, and Zimbabwean regimes offer fraternal assistance to SWAPO and the ANC in getting personnel in position, with the Cubans in Angola, also fraternally offering armed escort services. This aspect raises hackles in the Reagan White House.

US forces, either an afloat MEU, or forces based in Diego Garcia, are routed to Capetown or Durban to contest any Cuban, Soviet, or Angolan presence, but Democrats in Congress raise objections to any anti ANC involvement.

Fortunately, with the Gorbachev administration in charge in the USSR, and generally positive communications between it and the Reagan administration and other western governments, armed clashes between uptime forces on South African soil and unrestrained military movements are avoided. Chester Crocker, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Crocker, who had been involved to trying to negotiate a conclusion of the Angolan and Namibian fighting, before the disappearance of Namibia and South Africa, is assigned to work with Cuban, Angolan and Soviet opposite numbers on handling the southern African 'wildernization' crisis, by Secretary of State George Shultz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Shultz.

Uncharacteristically for Reagan, but characteristic of his final year and interaction with Gorbachev's Soviet foreign policy 'new thinking', handling of Southern Africa becomes a multilateral affair using UN and OAU machinery rather than a Cold War battlefield, from 1988 until the USSR exits the timeline in 1991.

However, the disappearance of South Africa's modern economy has some marginal impacts on the global economy and the gold and diamond sectors.

International and governing bodies, and the SWAPO and the ANC returned exiles all state intentions to respect the well-being and autonomy of 1588 indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa, and inhabitants, but in practical terms, movement by all sorts of private actors from simple herdsmen and family farmers, to commercial farmers, to loggers, ivory hunters, and mining operators, is all impossible to neatly regulate, and the spread of firearms, drugs and alcohol is impossible to fully control.

At this point, Zimbabwe still had a productive, largely white-owned, commercial farming sector for food and export crops, and the Robert Mugabe government was concentrating its repressive activities not against whites or capitalists but against rivals from Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU movement and their Ndebele supporters.

Mugabe down the line may have the same temptations to start pushing for land seizures by the mid-90s to deal with popular frustration with continuing and worsening poverty and inequality among the rising population, failure to implement socialism. But he may delay some of these tactics against the taxable agribusiness sector if he can encourage homesteading and development of more land for cultivation and resettlement beyond the old South African border to whatever extent he can get away with.

20, 30, 35 years after the event, what is going on in Southern Africa? What economic resources are being exploited by whom. And where downtime indigenous people and habitats are being protected, how is this being accomplished?