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Alt History ideas, rec and general discussion thread

Alane1 said:
Given the sheer tiny size of the US peacetime miltary and congress sheer resistance to increasing its size there is no way they would be able to hold that much teritory. I don't think they could even if they tripled the size of the army which I sverely doubt they would.

And how exactly did they manage to get Spanish Cuba?

Because I can't imagine they could have defeated the Spanish military of the era of the war against Mexico even assuming Britain didn't decide to get involved to protect their own interests.
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So first of all, keep in mind the title of the Map: This is not a "US takes extra land from Mexico" Map, but is the Map of "What Polk wanted the US to expand to". In other words, it is a map of a US where Polk got everything he either tried to expand the US to, stated in some speech a desire to, or in some memoir he wanted to. In OTL, Polk offered Spain 100 Mil to just buy the Island. The implication is that in this map's timeline, Polk's offer was either big enough Spain said fuck it or Spain took the original offer and sold the island to the US.

As for Northern Mexico? That region is at the time only somewhat more densely populated than Alta California by Mexicans...which is to say very much not all that heavily populated. The vast majority of the people living in that region were Native Americans like the Commanche(who were spread across both sides of the OTL border). I do actually see the US being able to keep control of it pretty decently.
 
Keep in mind that the tiny US regular army which numbered roughly between 15,000 and 16,000 men at least on paper struggled to mount a halfway effective presence in the RL timeline with most of the army being stationed west of the Mississippi scattered in either company forts or constantly on the move and that was without adding massively more territory to patrol.

Then couple that issue with a struggle to get recruits as was and a congress with an utter lack of interest in properly funding even the existing tiny army much less adding new regiments.
 
Susano said:
and as for this scenario, it wouldn't even require a right-wing German government to begin with!
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The idea I have for Germany in this scenario is that it is run by a bunch of angry Social Democrats and Liberals who didn't like the Versailles treaty. China is run by the left wing of the Kuomintang, but I don't know who should be in charge here since I don't really know a lot about China during this period. The Soviet Union is probably similar to how it is in our timeline since Stalin is exactly who I need, owing to his pragmatic foreign policy and willingness to concede to the Western powers. But, I'd change it if I can find someone else more interesting but still as pragmatic as Stalin.
 
i have a idea for a world where a christofascist american regime does something so horrendous, so depraved and heinous that it makes most non-christians view the religion as bad as isis/nazis. this leads to it getting severely opressed, if not outright genocided in several nations. the thing is, i have trouble thinking of something that bad that doesnt bring it into alien space bats territory. i imagine it would be like we happy few, something only vaguely alluded to until a certain point. does this sound like a interesting idea?
 
I mean, if we are being honest it sounds kind of like early to late 2000's What if post 9-11 America went religious fundy, like your basic shlocky timeline or cheap paperback thriller.
 
King Washington said:
So what would you realistically expect would have been the impact on both the United States and Mexico if the US had gone farther with it's annexations after the Mexican-American War?

Ignore Cuba
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I asked AlexGarcia about this a while ago on Discord. According to him, annexing Mexico down to Tampico would screw over Mexico's textile and mining industries.
 
I suppose you could use Handmaid's Tale for the Chris to fascist regime, but it would only lead to the drawn out extermination/destruction of Christianity your angling for in the sense that the Sons of Jacob's oppression of America's population obliterating whatever was left a belief that the various branches of Christianity are part of the same overall religion (eg Mormons, Baptists, Catholics become separate religions entirely) among the population that remain theists following Gilead's fall.
 
Personally, I don't think a single government can single-handedly destroy one of the largest religions in the world or cause the Denominations to splinter like that. That didn't happen with Islam over the acts of Iran or Saudi Arabia, after all.

More realistically, I think the US descending into Christofascism would just accelerate the already existing global trend of religious practice becoming less and less relevant to the world stage. For the US internally, I could see something akin to what happened to Leftist movements in post Cold War Eastern Europe (where the moral and material failings of the government's ideology led to any similar ideas being hampered for decades).
 
Considering Nicholas II's unique skill at taking second chance after second chance and fucking them up; what would be the effects of the rank and file of the Orthodox church coming round to Christian Socialism as an alternative to propping up the Romanovs?
 
Thinking on circumstances that could possibly allow Trotsky to return to the Soviet Union and, aside from initial PoD of Trotsky avoiding his assassination, if, say, the war with the Nazis has gone horrifically bad enough that they've effectively been pushed behind the Volga and the rump Soviet Union is essentially a military junta with Stalin and his clique presumably quite discredited, would that at least possibly lead to circumstances where Trotsky could be allowed to return without immediately getting a bullet to the head?
 
King Washington said:
Thinking on circumstances that could possibly allow Trotsky to return to the Soviet Union and, aside from initial PoD of Trotsky avoiding his assassination, if, say, the war with the Nazis has gone horrifically bad enough that they've effectively been pushed behind the Volga and the rump Soviet Union is essentially a military junta with Stalin and his clique presumably quite discredited, would that at least possibly lead to circumstances where Trotsky could be allowed to return without immediately getting a bullet to the head?
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He was killed precisely to prevent him from doing anything like that. Stalin was paranoid about this, and Trotsky was counting on a repeat of 1917 - when failure in the war would provoke a change of power.
 
Mithras said:
What if Quebec voted Oui to secede from Canada in 1995 and it bleeds into the 1996 US election as NAFTA becomes a scapegoat for Canada's issues?
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The issue with the referendum is that nobody on either side had agreed on a plan. Chretien wanted to suspend Quebec in bureaucratic limbo for an indefinite period and I imagine without a clear plan of action from the separatists I imagine that's probably what would happen, at least for the next 10-15 years or so anyways.
 
Comrade Future said:
He was killed precisely to prevent him from doing anything like that. Stalin was paranoid about this, and Trotsky was counting on a repeat of 1917 - when failure in the war would provoke a change of power.
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GiantMonkeyMan said:
It would be quite amusing if Trotsky became elected for the third time as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Third time's the charm.
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Well Petrograd/Leningrad would probably be in the hands of the Nazis in the scenario I laid out so getting an elected position there might be a bit... difficult.
 
If Islamofascist atrocities don't drive people away from Islam, then Christofascist atrocities won't drive people away from Christianity.

And they don't - studies of religiosity in the Middle East find that the rate of religious affiliation before and after ISIS is mostly unchanged, with any people becoming less religious being almost totally offset by the same number of people becoming more religious. If some fundamentalist Christian regime came to power, it would be condemned by other Christian denominations as corrupt and heretical, just as mainstream Muslims do with Islamic terrorists.

Especially because a fundamentalist Christian regime, like fundamentalist Muslim regimes, would suppress all other denominations as heretical and insufficiently pious. Catholics would probably be a vector of resistance, for example, since despite the Evangelical-TradCath alliance most Evangelicals secretly think Catholics are all heretics and crypto-pagans (I'm barely exaggerating).

What you could get is a militantly atheist regime, like some communist governments who suppressed all religious activity, but that requires totalitarian rule and would be downstream of their other ideological concerns.
 
the atom said:
The issue with the referendum is that nobody on either side had agreed on a plan. Chretien wanted to suspend Quebec in bureaucratic limbo for an indefinite period and I imagine without a clear plan of action from the separatists I imagine that's probably what would happen, at least for the next 10-15 years or so anyways.
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Parizeau wanted to declare unilateral independence the next day. Bouchard would not have agreed but it wasn't really understood in the rest of Canada that Parizeau was going to pump the gas immediately.
 
Prompt:Gilead makes contact with the multiverse,finds out they're a cartoon dystopia created by a feminist,and frantically whitewashes itself.
 
King Washington said:
Thinking on circumstances that could possibly allow Trotsky to return to the Soviet Union and, aside from initial PoD of Trotsky avoiding his assassination, if, say, the war with the Nazis has gone horrifically bad enough that they've effectively been pushed behind the Volga and the rump Soviet Union is essentially a military junta with Stalin and his clique presumably quite discredited, would that at least possibly lead to circumstances where Trotsky could be allowed to return without immediately getting a bullet to the head?
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In Paralyzed in Darkness he lives and is working to take advantage of the fall of the USSR
 
What would have been the effect on the New Deal if the Business Plot had actually pulled the trigger and it was openly crushed (they don't/fail at recruiting the usual AH suspects of MacArthur, Hoover, Coughlin for various reasons etc)?
 
I am inclined to think a civil war would be unlikely unless they also had enough states on board to support said coup even if they had pulled off the night impossible feat of getting McArthur and Hoover on board so regardless and would likely get crushed even if it seized control of the capital.

Without either said coup would just get crushed sooner and in either case might fuel long existing traditional distrust of the military which likely would have knock on effects like people pushing for an even smaller military and resistance to military relating funding including military R&D in the lead up to World War II.

Also depending on how things pan out and how long memory holds it might also have effects on the post-World War II period.
 
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