Endorfinator
Awkwardly Social
- Location
- California
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Somehow I'd feel that they just keep stumbling on archeological sites as they went down though.
History Strikes Back (TNO/TLM ISOT into OTL)
- Thread starter StarMaker764
- Start date
- Timeline Post-1900 Supernatural
-
- Tags
- tno isot (isekai)
Somehow I'd feel that they just keep stumbling on archeological sites as they went down though.
Ghaddafi’s reallygoodideas HSB edition
New
- Location
- The observable universe
1. Invade Iran immediately.
2. Declare a new Great African War and liberate all of Africa before the capitalist world can react.
3. Use shell companies to create crypto-leftist gun clubs in the US to arm socialists discreetly.
4. Discreetly assassinate Kim Jong-Il and replace him with his TLM counterpart.
5. All people coming to Hajj are to be given copies of socialist literature before they leave.
6. Take advantage of the fact that no one has claimed Antarctica and have the UAR claim the entire continent for itself.
7. Comintern should start begin operating underground clinics in the west to help people transition.
8. Have the Japanese embassy be placed right next to a comfort women memorial
9. Recruit the UAR's large Albanian pop, have them immigrate to OTL Albania and vote the communist party into power.
10. Expand oil production and give it away at such cheap prices to cause oil prices to plummet and collapse US oil monoplies.
2. Declare a new Great African War and liberate all of Africa before the capitalist world can react.
3. Use shell companies to create crypto-leftist gun clubs in the US to arm socialists discreetly.
4. Discreetly assassinate Kim Jong-Il and replace him with his TLM counterpart.
5. All people coming to Hajj are to be given copies of socialist literature before they leave.
6. Take advantage of the fact that no one has claimed Antarctica and have the UAR claim the entire continent for itself.
7. Comintern should start begin operating underground clinics in the west to help people transition.
8. Have the Japanese embassy be placed right next to a comfort women memorial
9. Recruit the UAR's large Albanian pop, have them immigrate to OTL Albania and vote the communist party into power.
10. Expand oil production and give it away at such cheap prices to cause oil prices to plummet and collapse US oil monoplies.
- Location
- Northish
This could work...
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Creating the companies isn't the problem. The gun regulation situation is so utterly paranoid you don't even need shell companies, the NRA would be very slow to come out against it because the majority of the actual organization decision-makers know what it means to put regulations on the books. The trick is to getting the left to think they need to militarize. The strain that won in the Cold War won in the court rooms and ballot boxes. Respecting the military just means they and us stay in removed circles and have minimal interactions. The closest you'll get is the black self-defense movements... that got pretty much stamped out in the 70s and took over four decades to reform. The NRA isn't going to go to bat minority gun owners.
The illusion would immediately fail when TLM!Kim doesn't ask for his wine and caviar.
Unfortunately Colonel, that's not how it was laid out. You'd have to evict a bunch of scientists from different nations agreeing to work in different areas and not mess with each other, and do you think you'd get them all out before the Air Force flies in?
I think that got brought up before, but yeah. That's how we get the parallel migration outrage.
"They got fucked with this thirty years ago. What are the odds those idiots actually learned from it?"
*One bout of fiscal and monetary policy later*
"OK, it did a ton of damage, but who could've expected this Federal Reserve to actually minimize the damage, or their Congress passing price control laws?"
Spylobster
Centrist-Malenyevist
This one is actually cool and based. Sort of like how Cuba has a hundred flags right outside the US embassy in Havana to block the view of anyone looking out its windows.
- Location
- Third planet from the star named Sol
- Pronouns
- He/They
Oh the Liberal Democratic Party would absolute hate that. Do it.
8. Yes.
Unironically yes. Where do I vote?
Unironically yes. Where do I vote?
DracoDracul
Transbian Communist
- Location
- Austin
- Pronouns
- She/They
To me the key is discrediting the NRA to create a vacuum in the gun lobby that we can fill piece by piece.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Hm... maybe. If the Fall of Berlin timeline is meant to resemble IRL 2024, then it's already too late. Post-shame and post-hypocrisy politics are in. And it's not like the NRA is susceptible to a coup, the organization's been a quasi-junta ever since the '77 convention. But if it's more like the oughts, then you could see the organization face more scrutiny from members, moderate organization members, and even Washington. Wayne LaPierre's got a decade of living the high life off small donations and the contract to Ackerman McQueen's been going for a couple of years. If the NRA as a national entity gets busted down for their financial crimes, even temporarily, then the decentralized millions of individual clubs and stores can potentially be picked at for sympathetic individuals.
But the tricky part really is going to be, in Capitalist speak, creating a market for the service.
They really should have declared a second Great African War. 
The oil crisis 2.0 is really funny and great, open up trade, do nothing with the money, then yank the carpet... It would destroy the UAR's diplomatic capital completely, so probably good to hold onto it as a threat until America or Europe does something the UAR doesn't like.
The oil crisis 2.0 is really funny and great, open up trade, do nothing with the money, then yank the carpet... It would destroy the UAR's diplomatic capital completely, so probably good to hold onto it as a threat until America or Europe does something the UAR doesn't like.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Financial warfare is like strategic bombing: It can be very devastating to both military and civil operations, and engender great suffering among the people. But it cannot topple a national government or compel a people to lay down their arms the way boots and bayonets do.They really should have declared a second Great African War.
The oil crisis 2.0 is really funny and great, open up trade, do nothing with the money, then yank the carpet... It would destroy the UAR's diplomatic capital completely, so probably good to hold onto it as a threat until America or Europe does something the UAR doesn't like.
The world is already having to get used to no middle eastern oil, the UAR isn't selling to anyone outside the Comintern, and most of those members are already large energy producers. Investment is up not just in Russia, but South America and Southeast Asia. A pivot to OPEC being more in line with BRICS's sphere of influence means there's still a web of trade to keep the cycle of business turning.
The trick to creating a captive market and making a dependency is not just volume. It's cheapness. If the UAR can make thirteen billion barrels of oil, that can flood the market but it's nothing agreements between countries for supply exclusivity can fix. But if those thirteen billion are priced at fifty dollars a barrel, at twenty five dollars a barrel, far below below what the other countries can justify? If it gets sold at both a high volume and at cost of manufacture if not an outright loss? You can call that undercutting, and the precursor to monopolization. I call that a drug more addictive to a nation than cocaine.
Think of how countries that subsidized gas prices for their people undergo immense economic turmoil once they have to unplug their national finances and have the price respond to market forces. Think of how a certain American industry built their entire financial structure around rock-bottom interest rates. It can't just be market access and production volume. It has to be a deal where the benefits make countries forget the political tensions and go for the ability to give both business and private citizens a great return by spending that money on other things. Keep it going long enough that industries are built around it, government policy decisions have been made predicated on free oil, rival oil-producing countries have to either make their companies match our prices or even more heavily burden themselves with corporate subsidies, until people are used to having to pay less than two dollars at the pump.
Then, you pull the rug and watch madness engulf the capitalists. You have to build a social safety net and make sure they have no alternatives before you set the net on fire.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I mean I think that in the context of TLM, Zionism is extra-double poisoned as an idea, since Tkuma existed and probably eventually got exposed for how evil it was? And the UAR, which was rocked in the 1990s by the reveal of a Zionist plan to backstab them in the 60s which got hidden to prevent antisemitism, would be strongly anti-Zionist as well.
I'm wondering exactly how the various Islamist/Jihadist groups are dealing with the situation. Al-Qaeda has basically been obliterated in the former Arab world and now exists only as disparate affiliate branches in Sub Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia. In particular, 2002 is the year in which Jemaah Islamiyah would go on to perpetrate the Bali bombings IOTL.
The third eagle (2002-2004)
New
- Location
- The observable universe
"Any kind of turn towards totalitarianism for Russia would be impossible, due to the condition of the Russian society."—Vladimir Putin
In every crisis in history, every calamity, and every apocalypse no matter how terrible there was always someone who not only survived but thrived in the wreckage of the old world; whether it be the dinosaurs taking their place at the top in the aftermath of the Great Dying or the mammals in turn supplanting the terrible lizards when the time came for them to exit the stage of life.
This constant held true in the political arena, whether the United Nations TL USA rose in the wake of the British and French empire's decline or the Long March's pre-communist Brazil becoming South America's hegemon as its own US withdrew from global affairs.
And in the aftermath of the economic pandemonium that came after the Wamda, there was no greater winner than the Russian Federation.
True the downturn had initially hit Russia just as hard as it did the rest of the world, which would have been a disaster for a nation that hadn't even recovered from the mass deaths and economic collapse caused by the disastrous shock therapy policies implemented by Yeltsin and the post-Soviet capitalists, and may have seen the barely established Putin regime buckle under the pressure had it not been for one thing: oil.
The Wamda had reminded the Western world of a lesson it had learned in the 1970s: their civilization was precariously dependent on cheap and readily accessible fossil fuel sources, only this time the civilization of petroleum had now spread out to become the lynchpin and lifeblood for many developing economies across the globe only for an act of god to see many of the world's biggest oil exporters disappear and be replaced by a hostile power that couldn't be coerced, couped or bullied into handing over its oil sources at acceptable prices.
True the US and Canada had their own oil reserves and production capacity that could probably plug in the deficit but the process would have taken years in the best of times and the oil companies were still reeling from the loss of so much assets in the Middle East.
With Iran and Venezuela hostile to America, Russia found itself in the unique position of having large oil reserves, a capacity to extract and export them (thanks to beginning the transition to a petrochemical-reliant economy years before the Wamda), and being on friendly enough terms with the US and its allies to be willing to trade with them.
These circumstances would result in Washington reconsidering its stances and policy towards Moscow to change, as Russia went from being considered a potential rival to be curtailed and caged, to being a potential rival that had to be appeased and worked with to contain a much greater threat in the form of the new Arab superpower, especially as China's growing ties with the UAR caused paranoia about its potential to subvert US interests to heighten and soured the spirit of cooperation that existed between the two states since Nixon's visit in the Cold War.
Moscow for its part was also keen on improving already warming Russo-American relations; the west's help is needed to both curtail further economic degradation, and the subsequent popular unrest and disruption that came with it (now an even greater threat with an internationally active socialist power in the mix) as the second Chechen war raged on in the federation's periphery, and both sprawling states found themselves in agreement on matters of needing to contain both Islamism and communism.
Though some had feared an alliance forming between Cairo and Moscow, such a scenario was never going to materialize.
Despite appeals to Soviet nostalgia, the government of Putin and his cronies was the state of the people who killed the USSR and fed on its corpse like a swarm of maggots, something that would hardly endear them to the Arab communists even if the Putinists weren't rabid anti-communists to their core, to them Russia was simply another imperialist capitalist power to be overthrown and thrown into the dustbin of history, and the Russians, in turn, viewed the United Republic as an existential threat to the gangster state they had managed to build.
Thus the United States (and NATO by extension) would find itself growing closer to post-Soviet Russia, helped by the cordial relationship between their respective heads of state and the UAR's recovery and increasing activity in Central Asia and Latin America, and Russia would be blessed with multiple lucrative trading agreements and cooperation treaties, helped along by generous support from international economic and banking institutions a keen on smoothing its economic integration.
Alongside economic relations came military cooperation, as the Russians sought NATO expertise and help in dealing with growing Islamist insurgencies in Chechnya and Central Asia while Russian support was now critical to ensuring the US maintained its presence in Afghanistan, the NATO-Russia Council now becoming a body of paramount importance in ensuring the two halves of the Washington-Moscow duopoly were able to work together.
Of course, these growing ties were not welcomed by everyone, most especially Eastern European states aspiring to join NATO (the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia), who had seen the initially enthusiastic support for their accession evaporate and transform into stalling, goalpost moving and talks that amounted to "not now", raising anxiety and fear from the specter of resurgent Russian influence in Eastern Europe in these nations and fueling the rise of far-right nationalism in the young post-Soviet democracies, already extant thanks to economic anxiety and the resurgence of anti-communism into the spotlight.
Similar concerns were raised over rapprochement with Russia were raised in Western circles to a lesser extent, noting the RF's human rights abuses records (especially in its conduct towards the Chechens) and its corrupt and questionably democratic character.
These concerns would amount to little, however, the USA had shaken hands with far worse than Putin's Russia, and the excesses of Moscow were preferable to the red menace and its totalitarianism.
Thus the world's policeman would find himself with a junior partner, for now anyway, a partner that would prove crucial in ensuring the US maintained a foothold in Asia in the coming years, even as it held its own aspirations for empire.
| Two eagles stand against one |
- Location
- Northish
Oh man Poland is not going to take this well at all.
- Location
- The observable universe
Not much they can do though
Spylobster
Centrist-Malenyevist
Eastern Europe almost immediately having buyer's remorse is kind of funny in its own way. Especially because their new neo-liberal governments are being fucked over specifically because of anti-Communism.
- Location
- Northish
I imagine they will be shortly going all in on a rearmament plan that makes the OTL one look conservative.
- Location
- The observable universe
Expect them to take all the wrong lessons from it
Gonna be a bit more difficult than they expect.
Spylobster
Centrist-Malenyevist
Would Russia allow their main communist party to exist even as controlled opposition here? The UAR and the fear of infiltration could push the Russian government to purge them entirely. Belarus too, as my understanding is that Lukashenko plays on Soviet nostalgia way harder than Putin does and keeps the main Belarusian communist party around as a junior partner in his government.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Well, that is true in a sense: You can't "turn" into something you never stopped being.
I think the line from "Yuri Orlov" said it best: The ones who know don't care anymore and the ones who care don't know. The people who genuinely thought that the USSR was a socialist paradise, the slayer of an empire, had no idea of what was actually being done and had no say in state affairs.
The people who did play key roles in keeping the The Red Czardom rolling, they saw the writing on the wall. Some drove tanks into Moscow. Some did it a second time. But the ones who won in the end, realized that propaganda and espionage, undermining the culture of democracy, were what made the Russian Empire stand through the 20th century.
The true inheritors of the spirit of the 1920s revolutions will never bow to Tzars, white, red, or blue.
Huh. So the Russian Federation hasn't outright asked to join NATO in this timeline? Or did Putin just do that private ask for a line-skip?
If the RF doesn't enter NATO, it keeps the door open for a break off in relations akin to OTL. It also gives some leeway for the former Soviet Russian satellite states to make a deeper commitment to liberal democracy. But… that push didn't happen for a few more decades because The Hard Times were barely getting tamped down before the ISOT hit.
This isn't 2024 Poland. This is early oughts Poland.
Their government is still broke.
Well, OK, not as bad as some of their eastern neighbors, but they still had agricultural dysfunction, a massive and unwieldy government they were trying to shrink, unemployment that was previously hidden under the Soviet economy has reached its peak of 20%, and nobody wanted to put money into polish businesses.
The big turnaround for the 90s reforms only came during the aftershocks of global recession, when the western end of the EU suddenly needed new places to put their money, new places to get things from, all the usual international business cycle stuff… that wasn't too heavily tied to the dumpster fire in the states. Poland's economy grew the most during the recession.
But a lot of Eastern European rebuilding is probably about to be derailed.
Blackwater and wagner figthing side-by-side againts the IRB sound fun ngl
- Location
- Northish
Building up the military will certainly be more costly but with a resurgent Russia on one hand and uncertain US support on the other how much choice do the politicians have? And this is before many Western countries realize how much the Russian have hollowed out the Red Army so people are expecting a peerish to NATO force at the border.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
The Polish government is facing alot of the same problems that we familiar with in Russia during The Bad Times immediately after the fall of the USSR.
The state has significant amounts of money tied up in (horribly failing) centralized social programs and government bureaucracy. Its public servants need paychecks. Their retirees need their pensions. And they have the same post-price control problems of low supply+high demand=skyrocketing prices. The past decade of slowly pulling back the social programs, price controls, privatizing state enterprises, firing their public servants, its all causing hard times before they reorganize the economy back up.
Poland's government has no money to buy guns.
The only thing going for a massive government spending increase is they do have low debt levels, 2002 was the lowest debt-to-GDP since they went capitalist. Banks would be willing to give them loans.
But loans don't just have to be repaid. Especially if you go through the IMF or other American-aligned institutions, the US government can tack on policy requirements. Even if those policies suck at helping your large amount of unemployed people.
Deficit financing of an arms buildup going to come with conditions that will not be popular.