Alternate History Ideas and Discussion

What about Kassandra rather than Cassandra? ;) Interestingly enough, at my first university, I knew a girl named Kassandra whose first name was spelled with a K instead of with a C. Seriously.
Well, yes. Obviously. You can see it right there in the Greek: Κασσάνδρα

No 'c' anywhere! Greek doesn't even have a 'c'!
 
Well, yes. Obviously. You can see it right there in the Greek: Κασσάνδρα

No 'c' anywhere! Greek doesn't even have a 'c'!

Do you speak fluent Greek?

Also, here's a fun AHC for you:

'Have (a non-Communist) Russia outright annex Manchuria'

I mean roughly within the borders of the red territory below:

Manchukuo_map_1939.svg


Mongolia (definitely Outer Mongolia but also, if necessary, Inner Mongolia as well) and Xinjiang can also be annexed by Russia in this AHC if necessary. The PoD for this is June 1, 1914 or later.
 
Uh, because Poland is where Prussia aka german clay is?
That may be a reason to conquer parts of Poland, particularly the Danzig corridor, but it's not a reason to genocide the Poles, which is the proposal I was rejecting. The German regions are populated by Germans (including the Danzig corridor) and don't need a genocide of the Poles to make them German. The Polish regions aren't full of Germans that must be reunited with Germany so they don't need to be conquered if they're more useful as a buffer state and if they were conquered depopulating them only hurts the German Empire because it needs all of its German population growth to replace the French. Depopulated lands don't pay taxes.
 
Do you speak fluent Greek?
I speak very poor Greek (and somewhat more adequate Latin); the lessons I took in school were a while back, and you don't really use it in daily life. ;)


'Have (a non-Communist) Russia outright annex Manchuria'
Germany gets its quick victory when the French badly bungle the war. Paris falls, the "Great War" is over within the year. Russia gets a white peace, because nobody wants to drag things out. The real stipulation is that Russia agrees to never again get involved in any war agaist Germany; so in the event of another European war, Russia is pretty much bound to just stay out of it. (On the other hand, they won't have to fear being attacked, either.)

On the Eastern end of Eurasia, China is still a mess, and Japan still has ambitions. But without at real "Great War", Europe's powers won't be so war-w(e)ary, and they'll have a few things to say about Japan's designs on China. Once China collapses into warlordism (and the odds are good it'll still happen!), Japan will want to make a move, and Russia can move in to "protect" Manchuria and Mongolia.


That may be a reason to conquer parts of Poland, particularly the Danzig corridor, but it's not a reason to genocide the Poles, which is the proposal I was rejecting. The German regions are populated by Germans (including the Danzig corridor) and don't need a genocide of the Poles to make them German. The Polish regions aren't full of Germans that must be reunited with Germany so they don't need to be conquered if they're more useful as a buffer state and if they were conquered depopulating them only hurts the German Empire because it needs all of its German population growth to replace the French. Depopulated lands don't pay taxes.
You're thinking like a rational person, not like a Nazi. We're talking about a Hitler with different priorities, but it's still Hitler.
 
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You're thinking like a rational person, not like a Nazi. We're talking about a Hitler with different priorities, but it's still Hitler.
You're assuming that because vile axioms lead to vile deeds there is no logic connecting them. You don't get Unhinged Fuhrerbunker Hitler until he starts losing and fails to confront that his axioms are wrong. You're also assuming that nobody will tell Hitler his goals are too long term. If Hitler doesn't realize the problem himself, someone like Goering is going to point out that the German People can't make use of that much lebensraum and ask him which population to pretend to tolerate and the premise of the AU is that Hitler doesn't pick France.
 
You're assuming that because vile axioms lead to vile deeds there is no logic connecting them. You don't get Unhinged Fuhrerbunker Hitler until he starts losing and fails to confront that his axioms are wrong. You're also assuming that nobody will tell Hitler his goals are too long term. If Hitler doesn't realize the problem himself, someone like Goering is going to point out that the German People can't make use of that much lebensraum and ask him which population to pretend to tolerate and the premise of the AU is that Hitler doesn't pick France.
That's not how Nazi Germany worked in OTL. Hitler consistently pitted his underlings against each other, ecouraging them to always "work towards the Führer". That is: he had them come up with competing plans, and all of them basically did their best to come up with what they thought he'd want to see, because whichever he liked most was "in favour" for a while. Basically an extremely toxic kind of court politics.

You are really ascribing a kind of rationality to the Nazi regime that just wasn't there. Kill fuck-loads of Slavs was economically insane, too, and should thus have been rejected even by a completely remoreseless rules just for being stupid. But the Nazis planned to do it anyway, and nobody said "Hey, Adolf, let's... not do that."
 
I speak very poor Greek (and somewhat more adequate Latin); the lessons I took in school were a while back, and you don't really use it in daily life. ;)



Germany gets its quick victory when the French badly bungle the war. Paris falls, the "Great War" is over within the year. Russia gets a white peace, because nobody wants to drag things out. The real stipulation is that Russia agrees to never again get involved in any war agaist Germany; so in the event of another European war, Russia is pretty much bound to just stay out of it. (On the other hand, they won't have to fear being attacked, either.)

On the Eastern end of Eurasia, China is still a mess, and Japan still has ambitions. But without at real "Great War", Europe's powers won't be so war-w(e)ary, and they'll have a few things to say about Japan's designs on China. Once China collapses into warlordism (and the odds are good it'll still happen!), Japan will want to make a move, and Russia can move in to "protect" Manchuria and Mongolia.

Can Russia instill a Russian national consciousness into Manchuria's illiterate Chinese peasants through a couple of generations of universal mass schooling? They would be East Asian in terms of ancestry but Russian in terms of culture, similar to both the Koryo-saram and the Sakhalin Koreans. Except that there would be much, much more of them.

'AHC: Have Marxism-Lennonism become as widespread and as popular as Marxism-Leninism became'



FWIW, Marxism-Lennonism is a combination of the beliefs of Groucho Marx and John Lennon:

full
 
'AHC: Have Marxism-Lennonism become as widespread and as popular as Marxism-Leninism became'



FWIW, Marxism-Lennonism is a combination of the beliefs of Groucho Marx and John Lennon:

full


Okay, I know people have come up with some seriously weird ideologies while being 100 percent serious about it, but this one smacks of parody. And I'd be very surprised to be proven wrong about that.

Edit
Scrolled through the subreddit, and as it says, it's chock full of wacky and satirical ideologies no one takes seriously. Now, if only we could add actual communism to their list... :rolleyes:
 
Okay, I know people have come up with some seriously weird ideologies while being 100 percent serious about it, but this one smacks of parody. And I'd be very surprised to be proven wrong about that.

Edit
Scrolled through the subreddit, and as it says, it's chock full of wacky and satirical ideologies no one takes seriously. Now, if only we could add actual communism to their list... :rolleyes:

aWlajkVo_700w_0.jpg
 

Very true.

Although, considering how many of those people probably went to their deaths still believing that the cause was fundamentally good... part of me wouldn't be surprised if I (a staunch capitalist) inexplicably came across Nikolai Bukharin's ghost, only for him to insist that "Stalin was bad, but the dream of a workers' paradise is not!" In which case, probably good no one can hear him, and that neither he, nor Stalin has a say in world affairs anymore. ;)
 
Very true.

Although, considering how many of those people probably went to their deaths still believing that the cause was fundamentally good... part of me wouldn't be surprised to see some Nikolai Bukharin's ghost insisting that "Stalin was bad, but the dream of a workers' paradise is not!" In which case, probably good no one can hear him. ;)

Everyone believes in the justness of a revolution until it devours them, and even then, they say "If only we had taken a different turn 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, then things would have been just swell right now"! :D ;) :(
 
Everyone believes in the justness of a revolution until it devours them, and even then, they say "If only we had taken a different turn 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, then things would have been just swell right now"! :D ;) :(

Too bad they bother asking why there've been repeated instance of revolutions devouring themselves, then, rather than just one or two bad ones that can be chalked up to specific circumstances that don't apply to everyone else.

The only good thing that Communists did was create more nation-states in Eurasia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_delimitation_in_the_Soviet_Union

Maybe, though I think it's worth staking that up against what these regions would've been like, without Russia going communist, at all.

Sure, there's no guarantee a White Russia would've been much better. But, on the other hand, a Tsarist Russia that liberalized
would almost certainly be better for Eastern Europe in general, irrespective of whether national delimitation happens. Having your national identity acknowledged is nice, but would a reasonable Ukrainian rather live in a demarcated (but non-autonomous) "nation-state" that endures collectivization and a huge engineered famine, or a more liberal and non-emasculated (but completely subordinate) region that's never embraced as a fellow "brother-in-arms" by the Russian majority? Granted, I suppose there are "iterations" of this scenario where you could get a bit of both, but I have my doubts about whether the delimitation of Eastern Europe—or, at least, the way it was carried out IOTL—was this profound good against a massive backdrop of evil.
 
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Maybe, though I think it's worth staking that up against what these regions would've been like, without Russia going communist, at all.

Sure, there's no guarantee a White Russia would've been much better. But, on the other hand, a Tsarist Russia that liberalized
would almost certainly be better for Eastern Europe in general, irrespective of whether national delimitation happens. Having your national identity acknowledged is nice, but would a reasonable Ukrainian rather live in a demarcated (but non-autonomous) "nation-state" that endures collectivization and a huge engineered famine, or a more liberal and non-emasculated (but completely subordinate) region that's never embraced as a fellow "brother-in-arms" by the Russian majority? Granted, I suppose there are "iterations" of this scenario where you could get a bit of both, but I have my doubts about whether the delimitation of Eastern Europe—or, at least, the way it was carried out IOTL—was this profound good against a massive backdrop of evil.

I want the good stuff (nation-states) without the bad stuff (the horrors of Communism, and for that matter, the World Wars as well). Is that too much to ask for?
 
I want the good stuff (nation-states) without the bad stuff (the horrors of Communism, and for that matter, the World Wars as well). Is that too much to ask for?

In principle? Not at all.

In practice? That’s… debatable, and while I certainly agree you shouldn’t endorse L. Ron Hubbard (liberal Tsarist Russia) just because he’s less demented than Jim Jones (illiberal Soviet Russia), between you and me, I’d rather take my chances with Hubbard.
 
In principle? Not at all.

In practice? That’s… debatable, and while I certainly agree you shouldn’t endorse L. Ron Hubbard (liberal Tsarist Russia) just because he’s less demented than Jim Jones (illiberal Soviet Russia), between you and me, I’d rather take my chances with Hubbard.

Agreed. I'd prefer to get this (meaning national delimitation) done in any Russia that does NOT go Communist.
 
Agreed. I'd prefer to get this (meaning national delimitation) done in any Russia that does NOT go Communist.

Right, but my point is that even a more liberal Tsarist Russia that doesn’t delimit is still an improvement over a Soviet Union that does, even though a bit of both remains the optimal outcome. 😕

‘Oldest Age Reagan Could’ve (Realistically) Been Elected At?’.
 
Can Russia instill a Russian national consciousness into Manchuria's illiterate Chinese peasants through a couple of generations of universal mass schooling? They would be East Asian in terms of ancestry but Russian in terms of culture, similar to both the Koryo-saram and the Sakhalin Koreans. Except that there would be much, much more of them.


Technically how many Chinese were in Manchuria at this point. The Qing - or Manchu - dynasty forbid Chinese settlement to preserve their traditional homeland from being overrun by Chinese. True, especially in the last decade or two of their rule their orders were increasingly ignored but it could be that the primary population were still Manchurians. In that case, provided that the Russian government wasn't too repressive they might well welcome protection from both China and Japan.
 
Technically how many Chinese were in Manchuria at this point. The Qing - or Manchu - dynasty forbid Chinese settlement to preserve their traditional homeland from being overrun by Chinese. True, especially in the last decade or two of their rule their orders were increasingly ignored but it could be that the primary population were still Manchurians. In that case, provided that the Russian government wasn't too repressive they might well welcome protection from both China and Japan.

According to the data here, almost nine million Chinese permanently settled in Manchuria in the 1891-1942 time period:


But of course their population subsequently exploded due to high birth rates.
 

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