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

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually that's misleading. In the 1770s Britain had the perfect strategies to destroy the colonies, they just had complete incompetents to execute them. What lost the war for the British in any case was the intervention of the French, who propped up the American Rebels without doing a single thing.

The United States also was not at war with North Vietnam in the earliest phase of the Second Indochina War, the Viet Cong were indigenous Southern communists who the NVA ensured were wiped out at the Tet Offensive.

There was a real chance Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election so a War Democrat would have taken charge to impose peace without a 13th Amendment but with the war continuing. How McClellan would have interacted with Grant is a good question. There was also, however, a chance for the Union to defeat the Confederacy in June of 1864 by seizing Petersburg and drawing the ANV into the battle Grant wanted all along, which would have ended the US Civil War in June of 1864.

For that matter a Union victory at Chickamauga (the defeat was due to a miscommunication, not Bragg's skill as a general) would have given the winter 1863 campaigns a very different character.

The persistence of the Confederacy was due to the sheer ability of modern wars to last quite a bit longer than the people who start them predict they would. By the same token after the Battle of Atlanta the Confederacy was essentially Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia. Just like Germany had lost the war well before May 1945 and Imperial Japan lost World War II at Leyte Gulf, over a year before it had no choice but to acknowledge defeat.

Oh mon dieu.....

[telemann.livejournal.com]

What lost the war for the British in any case was the intervention of the French, who propped up the American Rebels without doing a single thing.

Oh that's so historically wrong. As a native of Virginia-- I can tell you there are plenty of roads and streets named for Count Rochambeau, who had 5 battalions of infantry in Rhode Island, and his contributions at Yorktown were a very big deal in the ultimate victory over the British there. Washington gave complete credit of the strategy used in Yorktown to Count Rochambeau, as well French Admiral DeGrasse, who effectively blocked relief efforts from British forces reaching Yorktown. Never mind the munitions and clothing and money the French provided.

Re: Oh mon dieu.....

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

When I said "without doing a single thing" I was referring to the rebels, not the French. ;P. Without the aid of the Bourbon Dynasty the US rebellion would have been as permanent as De Iturbide's Mexican Empire.