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Honorary Alternate History

I did some digging into this and...yeesh.

From reading snippets of it I couldn't help but be reminded of Goebbels' The Year 2000, except with more fear mongering about Asiatic Bolshevism and "miscegenation". I don't think it's any oversight that the fascists are the heroes.

Actually, I came away from Red Napoleon with the definite impression that in the author's eyes the Red Napoleon character was the hero of the piece, but that he had to be defeated in the end in order for the book to get published. The only other person I know of who read the book came to the same conclusion.

And a little research confirms that. From an afterword to the 1956 edition (via the wikipedia "Red Napoleon" article: ""What Gibbons is saying from behind the fortress-wall of his trash-writer gimmicks, is serious and convincing: white superiority on this planet is finished, and, worse, if we refuse to meet the Third World halfway - refuse to shuck off the racial prejudice that has been a standard feature of our character from the beginning - we face virtual extermination... Gibbons found himself in a curious position [when he wrote Red Napoleon in the 1920s]... Everything he believed most profoundly - and believed to be a matter of life and death - would be anathema to his readers. Not only would the vast majority of his readership find his visionary slogan ridiculous - "We recognize but one race - the HUMAN RACE" - they would find it grossly evil.. "

I think the fascist admiration is probably genuine, but not unusual for the time, even among 1920s liberals. Fascism hadn't revealed its evil side yet when the book was written and Mussolini had a lot of admirers in the US. I've seen embarrassingly fawning articles in the New York Times about him in the mid-1920's. Mussolini was really good at propaganda stunts that made fascist Italy look like a powerful, progressive country, but truly awful at actually governing.

BTW: I hope this isn't edging too far into modern politics.
 
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I think somebody mentioned V for Vendetta in a previous post, so I won't go into details on that one here; still, I'd like to get a better idea of what specific PODs were used that would make it AH. The book and the Wiki mention Labour winning the 1982 general election, which leads to the removal of U.S. nukes from the U.K. ("the only election promise they kept"), and what seemed like a Cuban Missile Crisis-type confrontation between the USA (under President Ted Kennedy?) and the USSR over Poland in 1988 that leads to WWIII, but there weren't many other clues. Any thoughts on what the likelihood of the first POD was, and what might have to happen for the second to come about?
 
Any thoughts on what the likelihood of the first POD was, and what might have to happen for the second to come about?

Moore was assuming Labour would win the next election because god Thatcher's so terrible EVERYONE hates her right? The anti-nuclear program was Foot's policy so if he was in and had enough MPs backing the idea, it's happening - Foot's Labour winning isn't likely in hindsight but you could swing it, let's say the Falklands War doesn't happen (as it hadn't when Moore started writing in the summer of '81) so Thatcher doesn't get that bump and the SDP do better, as IIRC studies find they tended to suck away more Tory than Labour votes. (1982 election seems a gaff in Moore's bit he wrote for a DC reprint, since in Warrior #17 - also in the trade - he says 1983)

A conflict over Poland was probably just Moore throwing a dart at a map and/or a cheeky gag on WW2, but in OTL's late 1980s you have tension and pushes for independence in Soviet block and Solidarity pushing for changes in Poland (with US backing). You could plausibly have things go tits up in Poland and US-USSR tensions rising as a result. Whether they'd escalate to nukes flying, probably not.

Kennedy being president doesn't seem likely at all, he's just the president because British readers at the time would go "a Kennedy? Yeah, that's gotta be a president, alright!" like how Doctor Who writers on the New Adventures didn't really think Bruce Springsteen and Chuck Norris would be Presidents, they were just making fun of Reagan.
 
Moore was assuming Labour would win the next election because god Thatcher's so terrible EVERYONE hates her right? The anti-nuclear program was Foot's policy so if he was in and had enough MPs backing the idea, it's happening - Foot's Labour winning isn't likely in hindsight but you could swing it, let's say the Falklands War doesn't happen (as it hadn't when Moore started writing in the summer of '81) so Thatcher doesn't get that bump and the SDP do better, as IIRC studies find they tended to suck away more Tory than Labour votes. (1982 election seems a gaff in Moore's bit he wrote for a DC reprint, since in Warrior #17 - also in the trade - he says 1983)

A conflict over Poland was probably just Moore throwing a dart at a map and/or a cheeky gag on WW2, but in OTL's late 1980s you have tension and pushes for independence in Soviet block and Solidarity pushing for changes in Poland (with US backing). You could plausibly have things go tits up in Poland and US-USSR tensions rising as a result. Whether they'd escalate to nukes flying, probably not.

Kennedy being president doesn't seem likely at all, he's just the president because British readers at the time would go "a Kennedy? Yeah, that's gotta be a president, alright!" like how Doctor Who writers on the New Adventures didn't really think Bruce Springsteen and Chuck Norris would be Presidents, they were just making fun of Reagan.

I had a feeling the Falklands War played a role in, as Moore put it, "how reliable we were in our role as Cassandras" regarding the 1983 election; the consensus seems to be that the conflict (keeping the islands British "for strategic sheep purposes", as Eddie Izzard said :D) plus a restart of economic growth boosted Thatcher and the Conservatives enough to give them their biggest majority post-WWII. Reading the summary of Labour's 1983 manifesto ("the longest suicide note in history" :D), I'm not that surprised getting rid of the U.S. nukes would be the only success they'd manage to push through in the event of victory, given the political situation in the UK and the world at that time. Do you think this would've included Trident and the rest of the UK's nukes as called for, or would the end of a U.S. nuclear presence be as far as Labour could go with that campaign pledge?

It's possible IMO that Moore used Ted Kennedy in the wake of the latter's run for President in 1980; perhaps in the book's TL he runs again in 1984 and wins, given the butterflies of a Labour victory? In the case of Poland and the USSR, maybe Gorbachev is toppled around the start of Solidarity's return (or never comes to power in the first place?) and a more hardline Soviet government responds with a military crackdown a la Hungary 1956 to this and similar rising dissent in the Eastern Bloc, provoking a major crisis with the West?
 
Can't see Kennedy beasting Reagan off the back of things like a socialist Britain leaving NATO, he seems too liberal for that. He also doesn't seem like he'd want to start going "stop or it's nukes" at the USSR, unless there's something worse going on Evie doesn't remember (or Russia's got some new weapon system in Poland that's throwing off the power balance)

Ther'es also the question of why Africa gets megabombed. Parts, sure, but the comic implies most of the continent is lost.

Do you think this would've included Trident and the rest of the UK's nukes as called for, or would the end of a U.S. nuclear presence be as far as Labour could go with that campaign pledge?

Good question, would depend on the Labour majority and where the MPs stood. It would probably be turfing out US bases and keeping Polaris, but if we still had a nuclear weapons programme I don't see why, if everything's kicking off, the USSR wouldn't bomb us to be on the safe side.

Of course, you could say that as a result of turfing US bases, the US won't give us access to Trident tech and won't help maintain Polaris. Then add in the cost of the Chevaline upgrades. Maybe by 1988 - especially if the UK is in ongoing recession - Polaris is dropped simply because we can't keep it going without Uncle Sam and cash we don't have anymore.
 
Can't see Kennedy beasting Reagan off the back of things like a socialist Britain leaving NATO, he seems too liberal for that. He also doesn't seem like he'd want to start going "stop or it's nukes" at the USSR, unless there's something worse going on Evie doesn't remember (or Russia's got some new weapon system in Poland that's throwing off the power balance)

Ther'es also the question of why Africa gets megabombed. Parts, sure, but the comic implies most of the continent is lost.

Good question, would depend on the Labour majority and where the MPs stood. It would probably be turfing out US bases and keeping Polaris, but if we still had a nuclear weapons programme I don't see why, if everything's kicking off, the USSR wouldn't bomb us to be on the safe side.

Of course, you could say that as a result of turfing US bases, the US won't give us access to Trident tech and won't help maintain Polaris. Then add in the cost of the Chevaline upgrades. Maybe by 1988 - especially if the UK is in ongoing recession - Polaris is dropped simply because we can't keep it going without Uncle Sam and cash we don't have anymore.


Since Trident was announced in 1980 but wasn't deployed until 1994, dropping it might not be a major concern (unless the negotiations for this didn't yield anything meaningful in return, which would likely cost Labour dearly). Chevaline aside, was the US involved enough in Polaris upkeep once the UK had its own stockpile of such weapons for this to be an issue without it? Moore does mention an '80s recession, so maybe not, as you say, but if this hadn't happened, how much harder do you think the upkeep would've have been?

I had the sense the mention of Africa might be a mix of no or sketchy info (given the chaos of the time and Evie's uncertain memories) and maybe a massive fallout cloud from the strikes in Europe and on any American (& NATO?) bases on that continent, a la On the Beach or The Last Ship. There's also a TV news snippet that mentions crop failures in a Soviet Union still existing in 1998, which could be propaganda or an indication that the world, while seriously damaged, still exists outside the isolationist Norsefire regime.

I actually thought at first that the Kennedy reference was a mixup with the CMC on Evie's part, given how little she says she remembers of the war. President Ted Kennedy in '84-'88 does seem a stretch on some levels, but still feels plausible (and he could be taking a tougher line in the book given a hardline coup in the USSR, pressure from the GOP because of his handling of the crisis, or both).
 
Based on the themes that have come up in a lot of past posts, it seems like older (not necessarily SF) post-apoc works (WWIII, plague outbreak, birthrate decline, asteroid impact, etc.) could be considered honorary AH nowadays. Nevil Shute's On The Beach, William Brinkley's The Last Ship, and Strieber and Kunetka's Warday seem like three examples that would definitely fall within the first category, while Frank Herbert's 1982 novel The White Plague and P.D. James' The Children of Men, and Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle would fit within the other three respectively.
 
I wonder if War of the Worlds counts as alternate history? It happened in the past, and its quite clearly something that never happened.
 
Daniel Hannan wrote a now-deleted "what it will be like after we leave the EU", set in 2025, and in his honourary alternate timeline:

The last thing most EU leaders wanted, once the shock had worn off, was a protracted argument with the United Kingdom which, on the day it left, became their single biggest market. Terms were agreed easily enough. Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions, but kept its tariff-free arrangements in place. The rights of EU nationals living in the UK were confirmed, and various reciprocal deals on healthcare and the like remained. For the sake of administrative convenience, Brexit took effect formally on 1 July 2019, to coincide with the mandates of a new European Parliament and Commission.

That day marked, not a sudden departure, but the beginning of a gradual reorientation. As the leader of the Remain campaign, Lord Rose, had put it during the referendum campaign, “It’s not going to be a step change, it’s going to be a gentle process.” He was spot on.

In many areas, whether because of economies of scale or because rules were largely set at global level, the UK and the EU continued to adopt the same technical standards. But, from 2019, Britain could begin to disapply those regulations where the cost of compliance outweighed any benefits.

The EU’s Clinical Trials Directive, for example, had wiped out a great deal of medical research in Britain. Outside it, we again lead the world. Opting out of the EU’s data protection rules has turned Hoxton into the software capital of the world.

...

During the first 12 months after the vote, Britain confirmed with the various countries that have trade deals with the EU that the same deals would continue. It also used that time to agree much more liberal terms with those states which had run up against EU protectionism, including India, China and Australia. These new treaties came into effect shortly after independence. Britain, like the EFTA countries, now combines global free trade with full participation in EU markets.

We should also be now receiving European financial service companies fleeing EU rules to set up "not only in London, but in Birmingham, Leeds and Edinburgh too."
 
Now here's a weird one, with the interesting distinction of inspiring the creation of a modern country.

In 1902 noted Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote a book entitled The Old New Land, speculating what a Jewish-colonized Palestine would look like in the then-future 1920s. Long story short, it's run in a quasi-socialist manner with democratic businesses and labor cooperatives, and with Jews, Arabs, and others living in harmony.

It was a very influential book in the Zionist movement, and became a big inspiration for the foundation of the modern Israeli state. The novel is a namesake of an Israeli city; The Old New Land in Hebrew is 'Tel Aviv.'

I feel like there's so much untapped potential here for alternate historians.

A side note: I learned of this book in the introduction to Zion's Fiction: a Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, edited by Emanuel Lottem and Sheldon Teitelbaum. The introduction traces a history of Jewish speculative literature and characterizes The Old New Land as science fiction, and therefore argues that Israel is the 'science fiction country,' and therefore it's natural that the country has produced so much science fiction and fantasy (with the unspoken next step that you should read their anthology).
 
What, no mention of Robocop, with its nuclear-armed Apartheid South Africa and other 1980s future history conceits? (Not to mention USB ports so huge they double as melee weapons).

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It feels as though a lot of near-future movies made in the 90s are based on the conceit that 'the LA Riots are the new normal and it's just going to increase and be like that in every city all the time'. Which to an extent is building on an existing trope from the 80s.
There was definitely such a vibe in Predator 2, made in 1990 but set in an ultra-violent 1997.

I've mentioned it earlier, but The Aachen Memorandum by Andrew Roberts, meant as dystopian FH when it was published in 1995, has now been alternate history for a few years. Pity, because in the book a British referendum on the EU was held in 2015 and gave a slim majority to the pro-membership side (due, of course, to vote-tampering by evil Eurocrats).

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Just a pitch to revive this cool thread: Could the comic series DMZ be considered honorary alternate history? Part of me thinks yes, given the context in which it was written (an ever-expanding War on Terror, U.S. military overreach, Bush II, the 2008 recession, the early stages of Obama's first term), while the rest, considering the last four years, worries that it may actually be prophetic in some form.
 
The TV show DC's Legends of Tomorrow does a lot of exploration into alternate history, especially in its early seasons...
 
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