Alternate histories that are useless ideological wankery;

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are a very few alternate history points of divergence that literally need intervention by God or a sufficiently-minded alien from the Q Continuum to bring them about. Sure, anything is possible but for some things improbability is far too overwhelming to make a decent story about them.

The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via Operation Sealion. The Germans had no way in Hell to pull that off, they had no navy, their air force was not designed for that purpose, and the British were rather more formidable than the Germans realized. Sealion is as mythical as a polka-dotted unicorn drinking from Russell's Teapot.

The second of these is the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. It has a very, very narrow timeframe to do that in if we're assuming a recognizable scenario. Once the Confederacy resorts to conscription the South will weaken every year no matter how well its armies do on the battlefield, while Northern strength is ever-increasing by comparison. Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy. For that matter the South could only win the war in the East but it lost it in the West due to the Union's three best generals being up against the Confederate General Failures.

Another irritating thing one sees in alternate history are borders that are the same as our world's without sufficient logic. Kazakhstan, and a unified India and China are obvious examples. For that matter a unified China including Tibet and Xinjiang is another obvious example. Then there's that the potentiality of a late Medieval Chinese industrial state is always overlooked in favor of steampunk Victoriana, with the problem that an industrial China's a lot more interesting because Britain was two tiny islands. A unified and industrialized Chinese Empire would be a juggernaut on the US scale.

On the other side of things, Japan *always* ends up being the only non-Western power to industrialize and overtakes China in the process despite that Japan was traditionally a backwards backwater of the Chinese dynasties. This is no doubt due to ignorance and people being unwilling or unable to spin a tale about super-Korea or super-*Vietnam. Then there's the question about why nobody ever postulates worlds where William Henry Harrison never attacks Prophetstown which makes the War of 1812 very interesting.

The other major vexation in alternate history series is a tendency to uber-wank societies like the Confederacy and the Nazis. Timeline-191, despite being one of the lengthiest timelines gets really, really ridiculous. Not only does the Confederacy get a handwaved emancipation but it lasts too long in World War I and ends up with both an atomic bomb and the ability to run World War II and a Holocaust analogue at the same time, which would be rather beyond anything realistic. And the tendency for Man in the High Castle-type timelines where the Nazis end up more like Sauron than they do a society more inefficient than Stalinism that burned out in 12 years is both annoying and has a lot of unfortunate implications. The ones with the Confederacy do, too, but then the Confederacy and its crimes are regularly overlooked by of all parties the party of Lincoln and Grant so WTF do I know.

Then there's the converse tendency where some societies are *never* allowed to go anywhere. The most egregious example is the Ottoman Empire where points of divergence include things like a successful Treaty of Sevres (*shudder*) or the Greeks taking over successfully the parts of Ottoman Anatolia where most Turks lived, leaving aside that in real life they showed that had they done so Turks would be as numerous as Cherokees today. Or alternately one never sees Amerindians having their own version of a Meiji Restoration despite the length of things like the Auracao War or the Zapatista Revolt. Nor does one see Soviet-wanks the way one sees Nazi-wanks even though logically the one should be more plausible than the other (given the USSR lasted into the 1990s where Nazi Germany lasted barely over a decade).

Comments

[telemann.livejournal.com]

You're absolutely right about the Confederates-- look at what Washington did during the Revolutionary War, the British essentially captured and occupied some of the largest cities in the colonies-- and large swathes of territory in the Northern colonies-- elements that would constitute a traditional victory in any war. Washington hung by a thread until the French and Dutch provided money, and weapons. The British made some silly tactical errors, but then so did the Union forces later on. And had France or Britain stepped in with arms, and diplomatic recognition for the Confederates (and they were extremely close to doing so), things would have turned out differently. ESPECIALLY if Union naval forces started attacking French and British ships that were trying to get cotton from the South.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, what happened was that Benedict Arnold won a victory at Saratoga that convinced the French King he could get revenge for the Seven Year's War by propping up the Continental Army. Even with French aid Washington avoided pitched battles for the good and simple reason that he couldn't afford to lose one as with it went the Revolution.

The thing is that the Confederacy's cotton embargo willfully removed one of their key aces in the hole due to sheer hubris on the part of the Confederacy's leaders. That coupled with the Confederacy's string of strategic defeats at the hands of one Ulysses S. Grant, a real-life http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MaryTzu if ever there was one. Essentially Grant won every single strategic victory for the Union, while the Confederates never won any strategic or tactical victories in the West except Perryville (strategically meaningless) and Chickamauga (due to one of Rosecrans' rare mistakes in the war).

The Confederacy's leaders in 1860 also faced the elephant in the room that the 1/3 of their population that knew Confederate victory meant slavery and believed fully Confederate fearmongering about Lincoln were hardly likely to just let the Confederates win unchallenged. That they didn't was the biggest reason the Union had a switcheroo on whether or not emancipation was constitutional.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

No, what happened was that Benedict Arnold won a victory at Saratoga that convinced the French King he could get revenge for the Seven Year's War by propping up the Continental Army. Even with French aid Washington avoided pitched battles for the good and simple reason that he couldn't afford to lose one as with it went the Revolution.


The Dutch also provided a great deal of money. And you're agreeing with with what I've said-- the Revolutionary War was untypical in many ways, and Washington waited the Brits out, taking good advantage of British screw ups, and winning some time for overseas help the gorilla war he was waging against the British, preventing an outright victory for them.

The Confederate losses in the West could have been no big deal in the same way the Brits "won" the battle for large cities in the colonies. Had there been a settlement after 1864 with no Lincoln in the White House, I'm sure Union troops would have left all territory in the South, much in the same way the Brits left the colonies after the Treaty of Paris. But yes, I think the Confederates had a much smaller window of winning than the colonies did though for a variety of reasons.

The South could have won a huge victory but failed to follow up an early key win at the Battle of Manassas, and when Stonewall Jackson was killed, it was a major loss. Had Grant been killed in battle, imagine the impact of THAT death on the final outcome.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's not what I said at all. Washington's major contribution was avoiding battles. It was the victory of Benedict Arnold, later the American Vlasov, which secured the USA the French alliance that won them the war.

And you're right, but this requires a general a *lot* better than Lee winning a battle in the North, Lee was stomped by one of the worst Union generals of the war in his first engagement and got an even bloodier nose from Meade in the second. This neglects that by 1864 the Union's held parts of the South since the earliest days of the war and that by 1864 the slave system the South began the war for would be dead regardless of victory or defeat.

If Grant is dead, the Union's defeated because he was perhaps the greatest general of the war bar none. His two epic fuck-ups at Cold Harbor and Shiloh....one was a defeat in the pure sense, the other was actually a Union victory on the second day and a major embarrassment for the Confederacy. Where Jackson varied between competent (Valley) and completely incompetent (Seven Days'). The reality also is that the Union had several very good generals killed on the battlefield like the Confederacy did (Reynolds, McPherson) but that did not disrupt the Union military.

That it did the Confederate one was a sign of why the South lost: it didn't have a system that could survive the loss of individuals, where the one individual for the North whose death would have cost them the war won the war in the theater Confederate leaders neglected until it was too late.

And as far as First Bull Run was concerned, the Confederate army was as disorganized in victory as the Northern one was by defeat.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Either I'm not communicating well, or your misreading what I have said. We're in agreement pretty much.

That it did the Confederate one was a sign of why the South lost.

That's true of any key battle or war though, including the Revoltionary War: e.g. Washington was nearly shot leaving the Battle of the Brandywine by British Captain Patrick Ferguson, one of the Brits best sharpshooters. Ferguson didn't shoot because it was considered ungentlemanly to shoot another officer in the back. Fateful decision on Ferguson's part. And Americans weren't so kind-- they deliberately targeted British officers and shot them whenever they had the chance. The British lost the Battle of Saratoga, and the tide of the war was ultimately changed because of an lowly illiterate sharpshooter from Ireland named Tim Murphy, who assassinated the British Brigadier-General Simon Fraser.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, we are in agreement on most things.

To clarify my point here-the Union lost multiple good generals to bullets on the battlefield, but in no case did this imperil the Union war effort as a whole. Instead subordinate generals got promoted to higher ranks and the campaigns simply continued. For the Confederacy the loss of an individual general like Albert Sidney Johnston, JEB Stuart, or Stonewall Jackson imperiled the Confederate war effort because an army that needs charismatic individuals as leaders and loses one is a snake with its head cut off.