• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Stupid deaths that never happened

Wasn’t Anthony Eden being fed a cocktail of drugs (mainly amphetamines) during the Suez Crisis to help with illness. If so him having an overdose during the Suez Crisis would be something.

We thought Suez was a symbolic and humiliating end to Britain as superpower before, imagine how it's viewed if the aging was-in-WW2 Prime Minister kills himself by accident during it. Imagine the foreign headlines.
 
We thought Suez was a symbolic and humiliating end to Britain as superpower before, imagine how it's viewed if the aging was-in-WW2 Prime Minister kills himself by accident during it. Imagine the foreign headlines.

A very dark thought but is it possible for the press to spin his death as a suicide rather than an accident, leading to Suez being seen as Eden's embarrassment rather than Britain's?
 
Probably not at the time, no - not because you couldn't pull it off (this was a time when Eden's medication and Churchill having strokes was covered up and a few years before the Americans could cover up Kennedy's health issues) but because of the social values that IIRC would've looked down on suicides as shameful. "We can't say Eden was one of them."

It would probably be "Eden's heart gave out".
 
This one's less about famous people and more about the circumstances - during the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation, the Bundys' men almost shot the reporter embedded with them, because he'd tried to open a door that was off-limits and the folks on the other side had assumed he was a federal agent busting in. I don't want to speculate at too great length about this because the journalist in question follows me on Twitter and seems like a decent guy and it feels a little ghoulish, but if the Bundys had actually killed somebody the chances of a Waco situation go way up despite how much effort the feds put into avoiding one IOTL.

Not sure about long-term consequences there, though; militia activity ramping up was something that was happening already so I don't know if an additional disastrous martyrdom would actually change anything on the national level. More tragedy than POD really.
 
On May 11, 1917,Vintila Bratianu and Nicolae Lupu had a duel.The conflict ranged from talks to reform to the reopening of parliament. Irritated by Lupu's attitude and summoned by him to express his opinion, Vintila Bratianu answered him like this: "my opinion is that you behave like a bastard". Dr. Lupu challenged him to a gun duel as a result.

Vintila Bratianu, besides the fact that he did not have the fame of a good shooter, would never have agreed to duel, if his friends had not convinced him of the requirements of the so-called "code of honor",nearly dying.Him dying in 1917 would mean that I.G.Duca gets to become PM and leader of PNL earlier than OTL,though that would't really change much in the interwar Romanian politics.Lupu's political career would also be over,but that also wouldn't create many changes from OTL.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top