Sulemain
Self-Requested Ban
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- United Kingdom
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- He/Him
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You don't have to be a socialist (I'm not) to recognise how absurd this is.
Modern North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba ISOTed to 1950
- Thread starter King Washington
- Start date
- Discussion What if?
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You don't have to be a socialist (I'm not) to recognise how absurd this is.
- Location
- Earth
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- She/Her
As has previously been said, Vietnam isn't particularly socialist in it's economic structure. It does, however, have features that would be greatly beneficial in the case of an ISOT.
They have the vestiges of command economy and a strong government, which they used to great effect during the pandemic to weather it better than almost any other country.
They were able to simply shut down industries whilst guaranteeing continued pay and ran state food distribution programmes. Especially now, they would handle the short term impact of an ISOT extremely well.
Idk in the long term, their industry is pretty good for electronics but they'd struggle for resources. I doubt there's anyone who could militarily threaten them if uptime US forces don't blindly support an American attack or something.
They have the vestiges of command economy and a strong government, which they used to great effect during the pandemic to weather it better than almost any other country.
They were able to simply shut down industries whilst guaranteeing continued pay and ran state food distribution programmes. Especially now, they would handle the short term impact of an ISOT extremely well.
Idk in the long term, their industry is pretty good for electronics but they'd struggle for resources. I doubt there's anyone who could militarily threaten them if uptime US forces don't blindly support an American attack or something.
??????????????????? i beg your pardon? what had to do with number of victims of genociders Lenin,Stalin,Hitler and Mao ? please elaborate.
Back to topic:
1.North Korea is Stalin-like state,so after taking over South Korea they could do nothing more in Asia.Commies fleet always sucked,so Japan and Taiwan would be safe.
But if they gave half of their planes to Stalin,he could take over western Europe.More mass graves and workers in gulags,but soviets would fall becouse of economy anyway.
And USA had arleady stealthy bomber - B.35B.After mass producing it and A bombs,they could burn soviets if they try invade more.
2.Cuba - they are practically capitalist now,and Truman was not especially warminded.I see making money there and nothing more.They would probably sell their older planes and radars to USA,so they could face North Korea.
3.Vietnam - they are partially capitalist,and they fear China invasion.They would help USA against Mao,althought fate of Europe would probably not concern them.
All in all,if we had WW3 ,USA with Vietnam and Cuba help ultimately win.But probably there would be no war - i do not think,that american would fight for Germany/enemies/ or France/if they want communism,let them live in it/.
England would be another matter.And maybe Scandinavia,Spain and Italy.Attacks there could led to WW3.
Cybandeath
Lord Darkness, and Representative of Mad Science
- Location
- The United States of America
What part of North Koreas planes are mainly from the 1950s did people miss, also they have a rather small airforce anyways.
And your forgetting the Truman Doctrine of containing Communism, he would not let Communism simply spread and invade Western Europe that started the entire domino theory policy. That said mostly agree on your assessment of what Vietnam would do but Cuba could go either way in my opinion.
You are probably right about Truman doctrine.If Stalin invade with North Korea jets,Truman probably send copies of Vietnam owned against them.USA from 1950 certainly could make Mig 21.
And Vietnam do not help for free - they would remamber danger of China from 2020 and do everything to prevent that.And becouse USA do not liked France, it mean that Vietnam could take over Laos and Cambodia.And maybe part of China,if they decide to attack.
So,we have 2 possibilities - Stalin do not attack and only change is another purge in soviets and taken South Korea.
2 - Stalin attack,take over part of Western Europe,and eventually get beaten.After discovering mass graves in liberated Europe.nobody there would belive in communism.
Just like nobody with brain belived in soviets.Maybe USA even liberate rest of Europe.
Stop: Stop: Violation of Rule 2
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- He/Him
stop: violation of rule 2
Sufficient Velocity is not at home to either "Hitler was actually a leftist" or "Hitler wasn't that bad" arguments. Because this is not @ATP's first encounter with Rule 2, and they have just come off an extended ban for a breach of it, their continued participation on SV will be reviewed.
Sufficient Velocity is not at home to either "Hitler was actually a leftist" or "Hitler wasn't that bad" arguments. Because this is not @ATP's first encounter with Rule 2, and they have just come off an extended ban for a breach of it, their continued participation on SV will be reviewed.
Alright, getting back on topic...
The government heavily relied on social media to publicise public health information to the general population. Alert notifications and reminders from health authorities to take precautionary measures are regularly circulated via text messages, websites and social media; mobile apps were developed for declaring one's medical status, to track and trace one's daily contacts, and to keep tabs on the pandemic's development.
Which actually reminds me: Vietnam is going to be the only country with any decent amount of Internet infrastructure left. Any downtimer governments or corporations seeking to jumpstart computer development will immediately seek to partner with the Vietnamese tech sector, which was emerging as a regional startup hub at the time of the ISOT.
With an enormous first-mover advantage, a well-developed startup ecosystem and an aggressively entrepreneurial culture, Vietnamese companies will likely gain a major, even dominant share of most online services (social media, e-commerce, fintech, vehicle-for-hire, deliveries, etc.) once the Internet becomes truly global again - which should take around three to four decades, give or take.
And even the physical infrastructure will likely be Vietnamese-built as well: Viettel, Vietnam's largest telecommunications service provider, has experience in building up digital infrastructure and telecom services overseas; mainly in Indochina and East Africa. With state backing taken for granted (Viettel is owned by the Vietnamese military) and willing foreign partners, they can easily pivot to building signal towers and fibre-optic networks in the United States, Western Europe, or even the Soviet bloc instead. Of course, this might lead to a Huawei situation a decade or two down the line; but since even advanced, uptime Vietnam will never be a geopolitical peer to the US, the backlash probably won't be as severe.
Vietnam actually dodged a bullet here; the previous ambassador, Ted Osius (2015-2017) was a married gay man. Unfortunately, to say that he would have been received...poorly by 1950 America would be a massive understatement.
Vietnam's excellent handling of the COVID pandemic means that popular support for the government is currently at a historic high, which is another (intangible) advantage. The successful anti-COVID public health/propaganda effort draws heavily on militaristic themes, depicting society as an united whole fighting a "war" against the "invader" virus; in order to maintain domestic stability and social unity, something similar will be drawn up and distributed nationwide very quickly after the ISOT.
The government heavily relied on social media to publicise public health information to the general population. Alert notifications and reminders from health authorities to take precautionary measures are regularly circulated via text messages, websites and social media; mobile apps were developed for declaring one's medical status, to track and trace one's daily contacts, and to keep tabs on the pandemic's development.
Which actually reminds me: Vietnam is going to be the only country with any decent amount of Internet infrastructure left. Any downtimer governments or corporations seeking to jumpstart computer development will immediately seek to partner with the Vietnamese tech sector, which was emerging as a regional startup hub at the time of the ISOT.
With an enormous first-mover advantage, a well-developed startup ecosystem and an aggressively entrepreneurial culture, Vietnamese companies will likely gain a major, even dominant share of most online services (social media, e-commerce, fintech, vehicle-for-hire, deliveries, etc.) once the Internet becomes truly global again - which should take around three to four decades, give or take.
And even the physical infrastructure will likely be Vietnamese-built as well: Viettel, Vietnam's largest telecommunications service provider, has experience in building up digital infrastructure and telecom services overseas; mainly in Indochina and East Africa. With state backing taken for granted (Viettel is owned by the Vietnamese military) and willing foreign partners, they can easily pivot to building signal towers and fibre-optic networks in the United States, Western Europe, or even the Soviet bloc instead. Of course, this might lead to a Huawei situation a decade or two down the line; but since even advanced, uptime Vietnam will never be a geopolitical peer to the US, the backlash probably won't be as severe.
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Cybandeath
Lord Darkness, and Representative of Mad Science
- Location
- The United States of America
As far as I could tell he was not making a "hitler was not that bad" argument, but a National Socialism is still socialist / one of the forms of right wing socialism argument but admittedly I was not reading everything he wrote and could be mistaken. At the same time, it was a massive derail so I'm not sure how I should feel about this and if he has a history of delving into things that might have been a prelude to going down the rabbit hole as it were.
So basically Vietnam gets jumpstarted into being one of the worlds workshops, specifically focused on the tech industry. This is also around when both America and the Soviets were the most tech pushing as they push heavily on nuclear and eventually space race technology alongside industry, conventional weapons and more. Although while that will help reverse engineer uptime tech will come at a cost somewhere in their naturally tech development. Space race scientists for example being diverted to study the future tech.
China won't take any of this well and would be especially upset at having such a power as this Vietnam at China's vulnerable southern border where a lot of there good industry, economy, resource extraction, and even to degree agriculture is at. Southern China is just a generally rich part of China as far as valuable parts of China go so Mao will certainly be threatened and might try something but that would upset the soviets who would be trying there best to keep Vietnam neutral or even go back to proper communism so we might see a harder sino soviet split from that.
Still despite the frankly dark shit Mao has done to put it simply and not go down that rabbit hole he was not stupid so I dont see him outright invading Vietnam unless he feels he can keep both America and the soviets from interveneing.
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- Location
- Philippines
Their are multiple issues which might cause Mao to act erratically.
The first is simply the matter of legacy in that the PRC is Capitalist as someone who is a communist the fact that his legacy is a capitalist society means that there might be purges.
Another would be from his neighbors NK and Vietnam would be dangerous as they will check PRC influence by their mere existence and NK is very odd in that it may decide to try and do stupid shit as it has access to a nuclear program and rocketry but has difficulties in feeding its population.
He is unlikely to go after Vietnam immediately as the French are in full Empire mode as of now and Vietnam would try to dismantle French Indochina.
Cybandeath
Lord Darkness, and Representative of Mad Science
- Location
- The United States of America
Speaking of French Indochina they in my opinion at least will probably focus on holding Cambodia as the last bastion of actual colonial development in there hands to wait for reinforcements as holding Laos is frankly untenable and will just get encircled and stuck between Vietnam and neutral Siam.
Depends on how much the vietnamese want to get rid of colonial influences in their backyard.
Also, what happened to everyone in the original countries? Did they just go poof when the downstreamers showed up, or are they trying to figure out why there are suddenly skyscrapers in the country? Because if its the former, the French might be forced to go to war with downstream vietnam for killing whoever they had in the country before the ISOT happened to avoid backlash at home.
- Location
- Philippines
I think they will try the problems is that since this is before the Suez Crisis but also somewhat after WW2.
The French may try to fight Vietnam as before the Suez Crisis the Imperial Powers ( UK and France, France mainly ) really have no interest in losing their colonies and until the Suez Crisis they still considered themselves as entitled to their colonies.
On the other hand they lost their entire force in the French-Indochina war and will be hard pressed to replace their expeditionary forces in addition to losing all their collaborators in Vietnam
Interestingly, during the 1950s Mao's influence on the CCP hadn't become consolidated, as multiple internal cliques still existed after Chinese Civil War. It could be really interesting for the Soviet Union to learn about the Sino-Soviet split, the clown that is Khruschev, and Brezhnev who created institutionalized corruption. One thing is pretty sure that CPSU is gonna have a purge.
About Vietnam, its economy is going to crash hard. A lot of its products such as textiles and electronics no longer has any suppliers to produce high-end components such as transistors or chemicals. Vietnam doesn't produce these items because its industries doesn't have the technology and equipment to produce/refine parts (smartphones, hard drives,...) or the industries are too polluting/unable to compete the economy of scale with China (steel, aluminium and all kind of chemicals). If the Vietnamese oil rigs are transported with the ISOT, it would be a boon. Vietnam currently have the capability to refine as much as around 80% of its fuel need. I could see technology in Vietnam slowly returns to the equivalent to 1970s. On the other side, Vietnam as a state is not likely to collapse into anarchy, as it is a food exported which hasn't mechanized fully. Also, while its industries are lacking, its intellectual facilities are more than capable. Vietnam has experience with nuclear technology with a scientific nuclear reactor in Dalat and Dalat University has classes for nuclear physics. Also, in 2016 Vietnam's Pisa ranking is 21st, equal to Australia
TL;DR: Vietnamese economy is going downhill, but it has the potential to recover fully.
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Similar to the US, Vietnam can send a diplomatic mission to France; accompanied by the French ambassador, who can explain very clearly that if France couldn't even win against Việt Minh guerrillas in 1954, then there's no way in hell that it could win against 2020 Vietnam after losing most of the Far East Expeditionary Corps.
Of course, appeasing the raging ego that is Charles de Gaulle will be...difficult, but not impossible. If the French government can accept that Indochina was effectively lost as soon as the ISOT happened, then Vietnam can offer them uptime knowledge and favourable economic incentives; in exchange for political recognition, the peaceful withdrawal of French forces from Laos and Cambodia, and the creation of a transitional administration to prepare both for independence.
Vietnam won't make a move on what's left of French Indochina, unless some trigger-happy Frenchman fires first; the CPV will try their best to get a peaceful settlement with Paris. But if war breaks out, even consolidating forces in Cambodia won't work; Vietnam already invaded the country once, and some of the soldiers who fought in that war are now among the PAVN's leadership. It's just a matter of dusting off the old Khmer Rouge war plans, and adapting them to counter French deployments instead - which, of course, Vietnam is completely aware of through historical records.
In a standard ISOT scenario? Yep, the downtime area goes poof - usually handwaved away as switching places with the uptime area, or transported to a virgin Earth. So yes, France has lost the lion's share of its Indochinese collaborators and military assets - what remains in Laos and Cambodia is completely inadequate against the PAVN.
Had the ISOT happened in 1975, I would agree with the Sino-Soviet split being worsened by Vietnam. But this is 1950, where the Soviet Union and China remain firm allies bound by hardline Marxist orthodoxy; the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship was just about to be signed in February 1950. They would both view Vietnam as a threat: China for obvious reasons, and the Soviet Union for offering an attractive, proven alternative to Stalinist poverty and repression.
After all, the OTL split was caused by de-Stalinisation and "peaceful coexistence"; if both Stalin and Mao successfully purge their enemies and further commit to totalitarian rule, relations would in all likelihood be considerably strengthened, to Vietnam's detriment.
Yeah, having uptime history revealed to the Soviet and Chinese leadership is going to create political earthquakes. In the long term, the revelation of communism's ultimate failure will massively destabilise the global Communist movement; communist insurgencies across the globe will lose popular support, while far-left "useful idiot" movements in the West will be dealt a credibility death blow. Consider how Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Stalin devastated the Western left and laid the foundations for reformist, democratic Eurocommunism - uptime revelations will have an impact orders of magnitude greater.
Meanwhile, the samizdat presses all but ensures that uptime history will eventually reach even the average Eastern bloc citizen; the widespread loss of faith in the Soviet system that presaged OTL 1991 will happen three decades earlier, which means that even the Soviet Union will eventually have to deal with the ramifications: democratise and liberalise, economic "renovation" along Vietnamese lines, or dissolution once again? Further repression could only goes so far, especially when the prophesised "final victory" turned out to be such a laughable sham.
But in the short term, things are likely to get worse before they get better; the timing for our scenario is particularly bad. Stalin and Mao are still in power, and both are hardline ideologues who will stop any liberalisation dead in its tracks.
In the Soviet Union, a second Great Purge is inevitable; Lavrentiy Beria will have a field day rounding up anyone who even breathes the wrong way. With Stalin at the peak of his political powers, any resistance/coup efforts will probably fail, dooming the Soviet bloc to years of bloody repression. Stalin will likely put in place measures to preserve his personality cult, replacing purged CPSU cadres with hardliners and puppets, and prevent anything like the Khrushchev Thaw from reoccurring; which means that prospects for reform will be bleak even after his death.
China, on the other hand...it all depends on who gains reliable access to uptime records first, and which faction Vietnam and North Korea decides to back. If Mao gains the upper hand, then the Cultural Revolution is coming a decade early; the consequences for the Chinese people, economy and cultural heritage will be even more disastrous. Relations with Stalin's regime and North Korea will be greatly strengthened; conversely, a Sino-Vietnamese war becomes much more likely.
But since 1950 Mao is not nearly as all-powerful as Stalin, his rivals have more room for action. If any of Mao's opposing cliques, especially those who were purged or exiled in OTL (Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Peng Dehuai, He Long, etc.) gains the upper hand, then frankly anything could happen. Short-lived, failed rebellions? Successful anti-Mao coup putting reformers in charge? Full-on collapse into Warlord Era 2: Electric Boogaloo? Take your pick.
The last scenario is Vietnam's geopolitical dream; I can foresee the CPV playing multiple sides to prevent any one faction from gaining the upper hand, with the ultimate aim being to ensure that China remains permanently divided between mutually hostile states. Countering North Korean influence is also a factor, as Vietnam will back reformist forces, while North Korea supports the hardliners. This could throw the Cold War's dynamic completely out of whack, greatly weakening the Communist bloc in the East.
Yep, the initial hard crash is inevitable. But in the medium-term, how quickly Vietnam bounces back is dependent on how quickly it could reestablish supply chains (both energy and raw materials), as I've discussed in my first post. This is why the CPV will exhaust all diplomatic measures before going to war with anyone.
The tech downgrade is also inevitable, but it will be an uneven decline. Smartphones and computers will eventually break down, and advanced optics cannot be replaced; but Vietnam will do everything it can do to localise tech manufacturing, and many simpler electronics can still be produced. There is a small domestic integrated circuit manufacturer/research center, ICDREC, who can currently produce 180 nm- and 130 nm-process (1999-2001) semiconductors; this is around two decades behind the 5 nm chips of today. Of course, this is still lightyears ahead of anywhere else; but scaling up capacity to service the entire country is going to be an arduous task, likely not achievable in a reasonable timescale without considerable FDI inflows. After a decade, I expect Vietnamese computers and chipsets to be roughly around the 1990-2000s level.
This is also why aligning with the US will be more rewarding in the long run: Vietnam doesn't just needs resources and money, but brainpower. Collaborating with the Western world's vibrant academia and corporate sector will deliver much greater long-term R&D gains than the Soviet bloc, which in 1950 was actually still denouncing cybernetics as "reactionary pseudoscience"; Soviet computing in OTL only took off after the Khrushchev Thaw.
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AYC
Make blunts not bombs
- Location
- California
This whole ISOT is going to seriously screw with Americans' perception of communism and the Cold War. The folllowing are all simultaneously true:
1. God, or something like it, has chosen to throw countries with communist* leadership 70 years back in time.
2. One of those countries is essentially capitalist, albeit with relics of a command economy in the form of a strong centralized government with a socialist party leading it. It is not only willing but eager to establish trade relations with the United States.
3. In the world these communist* countries are from, the USA won the Cold War while the USSR collapsed into 15 separate nations.
So what exactly are communists to the average American? They can't be entirely enemies, because God (remember it's 1950, most are religious) chose to send them back and Vietnam is likely to become, if not an ally, then a very firm economic partner. But they're not friends either, due to both the continued existence of the downtime communist countries and the uptime history of confronting them for half a century.
All in all Americans (and westerners in general really) are in for quite the mindfuck.
1. God, or something like it, has chosen to throw countries with communist* leadership 70 years back in time.
2. One of those countries is essentially capitalist, albeit with relics of a command economy in the form of a strong centralized government with a socialist party leading it. It is not only willing but eager to establish trade relations with the United States.
3. In the world these communist* countries are from, the USA won the Cold War while the USSR collapsed into 15 separate nations.
So what exactly are communists to the average American? They can't be entirely enemies, because God (remember it's 1950, most are religious) chose to send them back and Vietnam is likely to become, if not an ally, then a very firm economic partner. But they're not friends either, due to both the continued existence of the downtime communist countries and the uptime history of confronting them for half a century.
All in all Americans (and westerners in general really) are in for quite the mindfuck.
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Melita Norwood gets shot for treason by the British and other publicly known spies from the era get discovered as well.
Eh... I don't think spies are going to be caught, considering there aren't many servers from major websites such as Google, Facebook or Wikipedia in Vietnam, considering internet infrastructure in North Korea and Cuba is near negligible. A lot of data from uptime are definitely not transported with the ISOT. Besides, who is going to keep Cold War-era knowledge about the US and Western Europe in countries, when these countries doesn't need to store them?
True enough but I think at least one of the British expats living in Veitnam would remember our longest serving Soviet spy Melita Norwood. Especially since a movie about her was released in 2018 Red Joan.
You'd be surprised. A compressed, text-only XML dump of the English Wikipedia is only 18GB, and the Vietnamese version is even lighter at 2.6GB; there are multiple offline readers designed specifically to read these data dumps through an user-friendly interface. I personally keep an occasionally-updated backup myself. Most data stored in non-Vietnamese servers will be lost forever, but some backups and caches will eventually be found in unexpected places; at the very least, a few language versions of Wikipedia (text-only, but still) will certainly survive.
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- Location
- Neptune
I have to disagree. The US attitudes towards Cuba will prevent that. Cuba has no interest in being ransacked and turned into a banana republic ruled by a USA-installed regime.
Sulemain
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- He/Him
From what I know by the time Biastra was overthrown even the USA had given up on that.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Didn't stop them from attempting invasion and putting up the blockade, as well as multiple assassination attempts at Castro.
- Location
- The Old Dominion
Yeah neither the soviet union or the US liked it very much when countries in their close orbit got too chummy with the other side or drift too far from their perceived orbit. As I recall the soviets invaded hungry in 1958, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979 to protect their own interests.
At the same time though were times when both sides found value in keeping countries neutral or at least not actively in the orbit of the other superpower. the Netherlands were forced to live up its colonial holding of Netherlands New Guinea by the US to the UN rather than have it fall to Indonesia which had then soviet and naval support for taking it from the Dutch.
The Afghanistan Kingdom received aid and support from both the soviet union and the united states with little issue, as did the Afghanistan republic until it looked like it would fully drift into US orbit then there was a soviet backed communist overthrow of the government and later soviet military intervention as things went down hill.
At the same time though were times when both sides found value in keeping countries neutral or at least not actively in the orbit of the other superpower. the Netherlands were forced to live up its colonial holding of Netherlands New Guinea by the US to the UN rather than have it fall to Indonesia which had then soviet and naval support for taking it from the Dutch.
The Afghanistan Kingdom received aid and support from both the soviet union and the united states with little issue, as did the Afghanistan republic until it looked like it would fully drift into US orbit then there was a soviet backed communist overthrow of the government and later soviet military intervention as things went down hill.
Castro wasn't exactly an innocent rose.
- Location
- Philippines
No but the question is can he convince or dissuade the USA from killing him immediately?
Is he willing to gamble at his current age to stay loyal to communism and hope that the USSR can back him? or will he go to shift to the USA and become a tinpot dictator like a majority of states?
Can he actually hold back the USA if there is a military confrontation or would he try and swing neutral.