By 1933 (1934 at the very late) the system has largely been set in place. If you want bigger differences than the names of individual actors you need bigger divergences in the past Soviet history.
You speak of the great purge like it's a given, but Stalin is much weaker internally here even if he got the same job. He'd probably get couped in favour of a pro American figure if he went for it.
What many seem to miss in general is that the Great Purge was a specific result of the disasters happening during the First Five Year Plan and the famines. Stalin needed a mechanic to take out rivals, punish the incompetent and criminal, and find scapegoats for his own failures.
As might be noted by those who read the older versions of this TL, the USSR avoids much of the disasters of OTL, thus giving Stalin less leverage to punish the undeserving. I'm pretty sure there will be a purge, just not a Great one, and focused on the actual criminal and incompetent.
But at the same time, I have my doubts as to whether the asylums would be well funded. Mental illness, outside of damage, is something that a lot of people find hard to really get.
I think you are extrapolating too much from the Soviet Bloc experience of OTL, and assuming too much carries over from the established powers of Western bloc nations OTL as well.
This world, the UASR in particular, diverges from ours in that a great grassroots groundswell of widely popular support for radical and sweeping revolution happens in the USA of the early 20th century. A great many things that to critics of early drafts of this TL, nearly a decade ago, seemed to be improbable Mary Sue importations of modern progressive sensibilities have been shown by Aelita and others in the author collective to have actual antecedents in real OTL early 20th century history, and others are reasonable extrapolations of what it would take to achieve the critical radical mass as of 1933.
A grassroots communist movement, in its organized party core and its penumbra of fellow travelers of more or less sympathy, is based on a widespread conviction that Things As They Are are wrong, out of step with better possibilities that are attainable. To get the scale of Red sentiment the baseline great change of 1933 requires, the criticism has to be quite widespread.
Large numbers of comrades in the pre-revolutionary days will have contact--close kin, friends--with people suffering various kinds of mental illness. Quite a lot of this would probably be attributed to capitalist exploitation of course, and we can be sure some of that is justified--and some of it is simply wrong, wishful thinking that The Revolution will fix this right up. It won't, not entirely.
I would count on the fact that friends and family who care about the fates of a sufficiently large number of people suffering mental issues would stick it out. I am pretty aware of how disability in general, and mental disability in particular, can drive wedges between people, and cause them to wash their hands of people who are difficult to deal with for reasons that objectively are no wrongdoing on their part, but easily misperceived as such. But I think the sheer scale of concern, the access of these mass constituencies of concerned kin, friends and allies of the mentally stricken to the machinery of the ruling party, and the deep and broad humanistic agenda of the Red parties they cultivate and are committed to fulfilling will all work to prevent simplistic "lock 'em up and shock them into sanity" approaches. As others have pointed out, a general commitment to the idea of reasonable accommodation for disability will keep a lot of people currently sidelined as too inconvenient to integrate engaged, and on one hand this will be a help to some degree to each of them in their subjective circumstances. But on the other, insofar as mental disorder is not a quasi-rational rebellion against a bad society (I am quite sure some of what is labeled insanity is that) but an underlying disruption of ability to process reality on any terms (processing it "differently" is a real thing, and would become more valued in a society that makes the effort to meet people halfway) will remain evident, and something both the distressed person, as they process it, and those dealing with them in work and community would desire some creative intervention and relief of, if that is possible.
A constituency, of persons positioned within respectably Red circles of power, therefore exists to favor allocation of effort toward serious scientific researches and development of medical (as well as political and social) strategies for trying to help these people, and many of them themselves would be better able than OTL to self-advocate and be heard. Pressure toward a humane and compassionate, sympathetic approach will exist. And the UASR has the wealth and other luxuries of relative security and confidence to take a breath and not go for the quick dirty solutions.
What this means for the psychological professions depends a lot on one's knowledge in nuanced detail of how they have developed OTL, and one's judgement of how reasonably close to best scientific practices they have hewed, versus how much they have been sidetracked and distorted by imperatives of social power.
To bottom line it, I think you are extrapolating from examples where social power has remained highly polarized and defensive of huge disparities of privilege, and understandably cannot draw from many hard empirical examples of a rich, capable society that is truly egalitarian and humanistic in its commitments. OTL people with mental issues have managed, despite tremendous adversity, to bring to at least progressive minds a more humane and tolerant model of how they should be handled. I do think that as with so many other modern social justice issues, the revolutionary masses of the mid-1930s will cut through many generations worth of authoritarian crap to come to fairly "modern" understandings that actually were present among some decent minded people all along.
To bottom line it, I think you are extrapolating from examples where social power has remained highly polarized and defensive of huge disparities of privilege, and understandably cannot draw from many hard empirical examples of a rich, capable society that is truly egalitarian and humanistic in its commitments.
I am doing exactly that. Whether or not that is entirely accurate for the USAR, I have tended to find (as someone who has dealt with mental health issues in my own life and in the lives of my friends and family) that mental illnesses are hard. Additionally, I am being pessimistic and intentionally so. While Reds! trends firmly towards a more optimistic leftcom approach, the society being created is not perfect, and one of the places that tends to fall through historically is mental health care to a degree that even the poor have not managed.
Excerpts from Geliy Rokitansky, Serve and Protect (Metropolis: Bantam, 1979) "There are no cops in our Republic. There are comrades and then there are dead men."
General Order 142, effective 1 June 1933, had ordered the suppression of all extant police organizations in the UASR as counterrevolutionary groups. All peace officers who had not submitted to soviet authority were to be arrested henceforth. Those who had collaborated with revolutionary forces would be investigated by the Main Directorate for the Political Commissariat, to winnow out any unreliable opportunists
I liked, and Liked, this canon post, but I was a bit surprised at the hard line these opening lines expressed. I'm riffing a bit here off my reply to ithilid's post above on the specific topic of mental illness.
This canon post is pretty much what I would expect based on prior TL iterations, but it seemed in the historical buildup to this version's more careful and nuanced step by step approach, that the simple hard line "cops are counterrevolutionary" had been much mitigated, and I seem to recall you saying that actually in the revolutionary crisis itself, a fair number of them came over to the Red side. Which, given the breadth and depth of the general mass revolutionary consensus growing leading up to '33, makes good sense, for much the same reasons that antiracism, feminism, gender flexibility acceptance, and skepticism toward ableism ("differently-able-ism?") is not anachronistic in Reds!'Verse later 1930s. Again it has to do with the very broad base, with millions of real people in real grassroots situations being contributors and credentialed card carrying Reds with aggressively democratic access to post-revolutionary power.
Now broadly speaking, of course the uniformed police of the old regime were, in a sense, to a man committed reactionaries. They were objectively speaking agents and enforcers of The Man, that was in fact their job description. But they were as you have noted more recently in this version, also of the people. And the people were not in fact mesmerized nearly so much as OTL by the hegemonic claims of the established order. Therefore people who were more or less on the lam in the pre-revolutionary decades, especially the endgame last few years, had a lot more aid and comfort than such people would be any time OTL.
This can and does, even in as hegemonic a TL as OTL, lead to individual agents of law enforcement being more or less compromised, a foot in both worlds.
To give a specific example, I resided for some years up in Humboldt County, California, at a time when the drug wars had been cracking down there. As people may or may not know, a bunch of countercultural hippies in the later '60s and early '70s sought to withdraw to various communes and one major destinations for them was the region some of their historians chose to start calling "Matteel," for a contraction of the Mattole and Eel river region in the borderlands of southern Humboldt and northern Mendocino counties. This area was particularly deserted of much development, being geographically quite rough terrain difficult to maintain roads to.
(I used to wonder, why was the old railroad line running from the Bay Area to Eureka and beyond abandoned. If you drive up or down the US Highway 101, as my partner, seeking escapes from the error of our relocation so far afield from civilization as we valued it until we could later move back south to Sonoma County, often had me drive the 200 miles, you come to a place, right on the border of the counties, called Confusion Hill, where the highway speed limit slows down to 35 or even 25 MPH and they mean it, for the road is so very contorted there. Railroads are more fussy about things like grades and more vulnerable to their foundations being washed away by flooding, and between the heavy coastal rains, the twisty land and the relatively high incidence of earthquakes--not far away is the convergence of three plates, and the coast range of hills and mountains there are among the fastest rising in the world--keeping the railroad open through these critical zones was unusually expensive. It was done back in the days when rail was the dominant mode of transport, but abandoned when between highways with trucking and air travel, and given the marginal markets of the "Lost Coast" far northwest of California, it ceased to be cost-effective).
Also the land is not of great agricultural value. Therefore utopian hippies were able to obtain leases or deeds to land there relatively cheaply. If you know your American Hippie, you would anticipate that they took--some, others are actually quite anti-drug personally having had bad experiences--to growing marijuana for personal use. It is not so easy to get in good crops on the dubious soil of Mateel land, but "weed" of course has that name for reasons and it grows pretty well there. Over time, these hippies were able, some of them, to start making serious money to supplement their lifestyles selling surplus marijuana to the general US underground market, and it acquired a cachet of reputation. Which attracted serious criminal drug dealers to come in and wildcat, who were regarded as a menace. Naturally the Federal and state drug enforcement types also took notice, and various grandstanding campaigns, known in the times I was up there as CAMP, came in with lots of money and helicopters and hard line eradication enforcement types to "clean it up."
Enter into this troubled multilateral dialog the elected Sheriff of Humboldt County, who of course had jurisdiction out in the boonies.
Now my personal experience of Humboldt county was not down south around Garberville; we were settled up on the periphery of the major settlement zone, such as it was, centered on Eureka and Humboldt Bay--Eureka, Arcata to the north beyond the little bay, Fortuna and some scattered logging towns to the south of that. In these areas, aside from the college town of Arcata where Humboldt State University injected some desperately needed state and federal money, the mainstream culture was quite depressed. Logging was the conventional mainstay and the industry was on hard times. Objectively I'd say this was because they had overlogged--once on an airplane flight over the region I looked down and observed that the famous redwood forests appeared to be pretty much gone, except for a narrow twisting line I later verified was Redwood state park flanking the 101, everywhere else it looked like moths had pretty much eaten up the whole forest. And of course globalization meant heavy competition for any sort of primary resource extraction. Politically though the logging workers blamed "the environmentalists" for all their woes just as their bosses wanted them to. The bumper stickers one saw were shall we say pretty alarming. National Geographic magazine later described the general experience of their reporter of the people there as "grumpy," and if one is a fan of old Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers underground comix, the story line called "Grass Roots" featuring Grump Junction on the Shark River was, shall we say, deeply familiar to my experience.
So the establishment of Humboldt County as I knew it was remarkably reactionary, classic of the modern imagery of Trump voters today.
Yet, despite being rather widely scattered, the hippie settlers of the southern county in their own countercultural world were in fact voters. And the elected Sheriff took note!
At the time, there were some remarkable comedy of error dialogs and misunderstandings and mutual obfuscation going on between the County Sheriff and the big governmental CAMP goons, in which the sheriff attempted to get the Feds to make a distinction between "legitimate" hippy small time market dealers who were just marketing a modest surplus of their personal "legitimate" hemp crop, versus hard line criminal dealers who menaced both the market share and safety of the established commune/back to land settlers with their exploitive smash and grab operations aimed solely at the larger US market. The Feds of course were having none of it, being quite bewildered and outraged a fellow lawman would equivocate on drug eradication policy.
OK, this digression probably is of limited application, but I think it does indicate a general ambiguity in the role of formal law enforcement even in a bourgeois state. OTL we can point to other examples, as well as reversing the dynamic to a darker side of things where the grander national priority has shifted to oppose persisting local practices such as racist lynchings and so on, and the local law is out of step and protective of "traditional" ways. Those cases at least are pretty familiar to this audience I would think.
So there are cops and cops. By and large, we expect, as progressives, fear, that when push comes to shove, they form ranks into the Thin Blue Line and the least bad among them fall into lockstep behind the worst. But in more ambiguous circumstances, we find that some become expert at tipping off the people they are supposed to catch, at selective blindness, and even sometimes open their mouths as the sheriffs of Humboldt county did, and say things that other police find just amazing--for good or for ill, depending on which side you are on.
----
I reconcile your prior acknowledgement that not a few police had been more or less helpful to the Reds prior to the crisis and some did break ranks and go over to the revolutionaries, with the very hard line taken in this post, which echoes at first glance what Leon Trotsky's history of the 1917 Revolution in Petrograd claimed was true of the fate of Tsarist police under Soviet rule. Per Trotsky, the police were known by the street masses as "pharaohs" alluding to the oppressive Egyptian order in the Biblical Book of Exodus, and in the February Revolution, long before the Bolsheviks took over in "October," they disappeared completely, never to return. I believe right up to the day the USSR collapsed, and perhaps to this very day in the Russian Republic, the Soviet regime never had "police" again, not street cops anyway. They had "militia;" a cop was a "militiaman," just as until Stalin later normalized state bureaucracy in the later '30s, the Soviet Union had no bureaus or Ministers of them, no, they had Committees, and people like Trotsky or Stalin bore the title of "Commissar."
Trotsky said that most of the police disappeared because the mobs found them and killed them. Others escaped, but never dared show faces in Petrograd again--I don't know if he would assume they fled all Soviet power and wound up emigres, or just settled down elsewhere in Russia hiding their former police status. The point being, any one sticking his head up openly would be a marked man, if the regime did not try and execute him, the mobs would lynch him.
Now clearly this simple black and white picture, if I can trust Trotsky on the Russian case, does not quite hold in the UASR. Not a few old line cops did service of some degree to the Revolution.
But while I did not expect formal language so hard and sweeping in tone as you opened this post with, I do seem to recall you did say that as in the USSR, American police forces don't go by that name. It was mainly the tone of it that surprised me.
I would think in reality by the time the decree is published, the work of sorting out sheep and goats among the former cops in custody has largely been done, and the MDPC would largely be a review of ad hoc decisions already made on the spot and at the time by revolutionary force commanders before the standing committee of their forces. Whether a particular cop's or even squad of them coming over wholesale's services outweigh their prerevolutionary oppressions would have been judged already, and accordingly some would have been shot for those previous crimes, others allowed to run into exile on pain of a standing death warrant, others put on probation and with reduced civil rights, others simply released into the wild of the community with proscriptions against doing more police work and with vengeful publics warned off bothering them if they kept clean, and still others admitted, case by case, into the militias---either separated from police work, to prove themselves on the still hot battle fronts elsewhere, or even taken in as captive guides as it were to the de facto reestablishment of the new militia based approach to keeping public law and order. A few might even be embraced as true comrades in the fashion Patton and other subversive military types would be celebrated--to merit such treatment they'd have to have been actively aiding the Revolution quite a lot of course, and actions necessary to maintain their cover might still cloud their status, so such heroes of the Revolution would be few indeed.
So, the situation on the ground the MDPC would find is that most of their work is done, and basically all they have to do is review it to make sure it wasn't done corruptly or with major errors due to ignorance, and to get a complete account of the facts of the pre-revolutionary docket of offenses, for future legal reference should someone hiding underground pop up. The new federal organs and new Republics would also have to formalize and regularize the organization of the new forces and clarify everyone's formal status.
Am I right in thinking the decree is therefore a matter mainly of crossing T's and dotting I's, or do I badly underestimate the disorder and confusion that must be waded through still?
I choose to be more optimistic, on the theory that we have not seen in this world of OTL yet a truly democratic society, a true regime of for and by the people, and that people are more or less decently intended. I could go to a pretty dark place with pessimism myself, being a person who like you has seen some of how society handles the disabled generally and also people with mental issues particularly, and how it can be corrosive precisely of one's closest personal ties. But while I am scientifically minded enough to accept that quite a lot of mental illness as we see it is based on biological dysfunctions and not a mere subjective reaction to an oppressive society, and not a few people will recoil from people they ought to stand by in some abstract sense out of a sense of ingratitude that the sufferers don't have their problems automatically and magically solved by the Victory of the Revolution.
Nevertheless I do think that the establishment of a truly democratic order, by people who have quite recently had to fight hard to win it, with strong norms of power to the people not being subverted by some sense of emergency submission to top down authority, will in fact enable a much higher demand for humane and fair minded solutions across the board, and this includes dissenters advocating for special cases posing inconvenient scientific challenges to too-convenient magisterial top down blanket diagnoses, spurring serious scientific engagement with really knotty problems and a hard insistence that pragmatic short term solutions still conform to a standard of fairness and reasonableness, and not lean on arbitrary terror. Take away the easy recourse to such sweeping violence unchecked by inquiry and advocacy, and the horror stories of our history are much less likely to dominate.
I don't agree with a common attitude I find in critics of this canon, that there is some kind of Conservation of Cussedness that must hold, that if we grudgingly grant that this or that is better, then something else must be worse, because people are just fundamentally in some combination stupid or mean.
Of course this marks me as someone whose faith in the basic rightness of the Enlightenment paradigm, that we can, working together in good faith, do better than things as they are, has not been completely crushed as of yet. Perhaps it will be, not so long from now the way things seem to be going OTL lately, and perhaps if not, I will remain crazy and dysfunctional and irrelevant too. But I don't see any percentage in just submitting to pessimism as an incontrovertibly proven outlook either. I just believe still, people can be better than they are. And I think the premise here is a concrete thought experiment in a way they could have been.
Which puts me at odds with canon, frankly, since I think the Cold War post-WWII penciled in is not sustainable on the terms offered. If the capitalist bloc does attempt to square the circle of sustaining the hierarchy of property in the face of Red successes I think are plainly to be extrapolated from this basis as offered, and won't join in a general demand that the TL handicap the UASR with some sort of fatal feet of clay to give the FBU some fair break to survive on capitalist terms, the FBU will go bankrupt fast. They would have to go hardline fascist to have a prayer of maintaining a balance of terror holding off Red liberation, mainly to check internal subversion. Given the canon consensus the FBU leadership, fearing to go full on Orwellian Fascist, temporizes with bread and circuses social democratic, or rather top down paternalist welfarism, concessions to working class material welfare, either the economic equations cannot balance because there is not enough productivity to give the working classes a competitively rich material standard of living while maintaining the privileged ones in a measurably superior standard, or the problem has to be shuffled somehow to make it some working classes--presumably those of western Europe--nice while doubling down on colonial/puppet government indirectly ruled colonial sphere exploitation. Yet we are told that coopting the colonial peoples enough to get a solid pro-FBU elite stratum running the places is part of the FBU package. Keeping the masses fooled by purely cultural hegemonic Jedi mind tricks will not cut it either, not without again the state, on behalf of the privileged, taking extreme measures to restrict freedom of communication. There are only so many lies they can tell about the horrors of the Red bloc before they are discounted with complete contemptuous skepticism. There is only so much undermining and discrediting populist firebrands that can be done internally as well--barring open fascism, plain imposition of official truth and state terror without recourse.
The FBU going down a much darker path, I could believe. There is no soft path for them to survive on mere cultural mesmerization. Sooner or later, my guess is by the 1970s, they will face an internal crisis and either incrementally, with the ruling class paralyzed with fear of becoming too fascist with the living memory of Hitler staying their hand, and the example, known to their more informed intelligentsia if not widely known, that Red bloc living standards aren't so bad and they really don't have a lot to lose if the populist rebels win, collapsing peacefully, perhaps via social democratic halfway houses where, the people taking communications restrictions with the Red bloc off, they learn how directly and simply they can have everything they want by just adopting Red bloc ways and joining the mainstream of world history--or if the privileged have more resolve than that, it will turn bloody. Perhaps a brief era of soft welfarist Indian summer of post war capitalism can exist, and when the hard times come, a gradual, slow drift to fascism by degrees can hold off effective revolution and gradually bring the FBU block to the bitterly fascist end I suppose might be sustainable.
What is not possible is that the Red bloc coincides with a rich soft capitalism guaranteeing stability with welfare for all.
If instead we pre-hobble the Reds, if we demand they have to have something wrong with them for the story to be "realistic," because human nature is just doomed to misery, then that canon narrative might be much more sustainable. But I think the story is too committed to a really humanistic dialectic to allow for that without arbitrary handwaving in pointless disabilities justified only by this alien ideological demand.
That long post reminds me of Those Who Walk Away from Omelas and it's "utopia with a dark secret since you can't believe true utopia can exist without one" idea.
That long post reminds me of Those Who Walk Away from Omelas and it's "utopia with a dark secret since you can't believe true utopia can exist without one" idea.
Problem is that in the latter half of the post about the FBU Post-World War II he/she is right. The FBU is too weak geopolitically (I would probably change one or two things like the FBU getting most of OTL current-day Germany and India and Brazil more competently industrializing and having population booms, as counters to USSR and China) and too socially conservative...even when compared to OTL. I would have thought that the FBU would heavily socially liberalize to counter the libertine attitudes of the UASR and prevent its own youth from becoming outright 5th Columnists.
Because otherwise? You won't be getting a Cold War till the 2020s. With a socialist China, USSR, Japan, and America, and their satellites, the Cold War would end in the 1970s with the defection of Canada causing a massive domino effect in a very much quasi-fascist Capitalist Block. And not what we got: Just the Cold War becoming Colder for a few decades.
I simply do not know what the authors' goals and ideas are. I am throwing out guesses here. Maybe in this new version, the Blue Block falls apart in the 1970s/1980s like Neo-Stalinist Communism fell in OTL in 1989.
The FBU is in a better economic position than the Soviet Union was in 1946. The British Empire as a whole had a GDP of a little more than double that of the USSR's and the French Republic; while not quite on the same level, was still also a great power. The FBU also controls most of Europe's single most densely populated and economically productive region: the so called "blue banana". Blue Banana - Wikipedia Which is to the European continent as the American east coast megalopolis is to North America and is in fact; actually about twice as big in terms of people (about the same as the Northeast Megalopolis and the Great Lakes megalopolis put together.) It also controls basically the entirety of Europe's other principal megalopolis: the unoriginally named "golden" banana. Golden Banana - Wikipedia
Control over the majority of both regions is more than enough to form the foundations of a superpower. That's a massive number of generally decently educated people in a geographically concentrated space to call upon. Western Europe has access to most industrially important minerals and what it doesn't it can harvest from elsewhere, and while western europe's landmass doesn't have easily accessed oil, there's plenty to be found in the North Sea, Arabia, and Venezuela among other places.
The perception of Europe as generally militarily weak is born out of western europe substantially drawing down on military investment after the second world war in our timeline due to America and the Soviet Union being expected to take the great bulk of the burden of military efforts with the Warsaw pact militaries being at times essentially extensions of its Soviet counterpart while the Euro-NATO militaries had refocuses in doctrine. Instead of the huge but mostly foot or train mobile standing armies of the first half of the twentieth century, they'd instead have substantially smaller but fully motorised/mechanised standing armies backed up by a robust system of reserves in case of emergencies. Euro-NATO definitely had the potential to build up forces to rival Ameri-NATO or the Warsaw Pact if it needed to, but it didn't. Had there been a sufficiently nasty Euro-American split there probably would have been a rather quick build up of western european forces in response.
And of course post-cold war the need for those big reserve systems dried up so those were left to wither while the standing armies all got even smaller.
The FBU is in a better economic position than the Soviet Union was in 1946. The British Empire as a whole had a GDP of a little more than double that of the USSR's and the French Republic; while not quite on the same level, was still also a great power. The FBU also controls most of Europe's single most densely populated and economically productive region: the so called "blue banana". Blue Banana - Wikipedia Which is to the European continent as the American east coast megalopolis is to North America and is in fact; actually about twice as big in terms of people (about the same as the Northeast Megalopolis and the Great Lakes megalopolis put together.) It also controls basically the entirety of Europe's other principal megalopolis: the unoriginally named "golden" banana. Golden Banana - Wikipedia
Control over the majority of both regions is more than enough to form the foundations of a superpower. That's a massive number of generally decently educated people in a geographically concentrated space to call upon. Western Europe has access to most industrially important minerals and what it doesn't it can harvest from elsewhere, and while western europe's landmass doesn't have easily accessed oil, there's plenty to be found in the North Sea, Arabia, and Venezuela among other places.
The perception of Europe as generally militarily weak is born out of western europe substantially drawing down on military investment after the second world war in our timeline due to America and the Soviet Union being expected to take the great bulk of the burden of military efforts with the Warsaw pact militaries being at times essentially extensions of its Soviet counterpart while the Euro-NATO militaries had refocuses in doctrine. Instead of the huge but mostly foot or train mobile standing armies of the first half of the twentieth century, they'd instead have substantially smaller but fully motorised/mechanised standing armies backed up by a robust system of reserves in case of emergencies. Euro-NATO definitely had the potential to build up forces to rival Ameri-NATO or the Warsaw Pact if it needed to, but it didn't. Had there been a sufficiently nasty Euro-American split there probably would have been a rather quick build up of western european forces in response.
And of course post-cold war the need for those big reserve systems dried up so those were left to wither while the standing armies all got even smaller.
The problem is, that with such a build-up being a resource drain, you cannot do social-economic policies that would prevent your population from going over to the Red Block by the 1970s. That was the US-Euro agreement during the OTL Cold War: The US will be the security guarantor and put all its resources into protecting Europe&co, while Europe&co will be the Economic/Social/Cultural Magnet used to slowly eat away at the political coherence of the Warsaw Pact via its mere presence alone.
This is NOT the case in REDS! where China, USSR and America are going full tillt population militarization. Europe alone, with its colonies, CANNOT compete against that for more then a few decades.
The problem is, that with such a build-up being a resource drain, you cannot do social-economic policies that would prevent your population from going over to the Red Block by the 1970s. That was the US-Euro agreement during the OTL Cold War: The US will be the security guarantor and put all its resources into protecting Europe&co, while Europe&co will be the Economic/Social/Cultural Magnet used to slowly eat away at the political coherence of the Warsaw Pact via its mere presence alone.
This is NOT the case in REDS! where China, USSR and America are going full tillt population militarization. Europe alone, with its colonies, CANNOT compete against that for more then a few decades.
China's a wartorn ruin that will need decades to climb out of the mess the late 19th and early 20th centuries left it in. The Soviet Union faces a Germany sized problem that cannot be resolved without staggering loss of life and materiel and eastern Europe is both poorer and more sparsely populated than its western counterpart.
And despite the USSR's clear weakness compared to the USA it managed to hold on for four and a half decades and mostly fell apart because of easily butterfliable internal political difficulties more so than any external action on America's part, even with what was supposed to be its greatest ally (China) becoming an opposed third party actor and eventually outright flipping over to the American camp. The Soviet Union by the 1980s was a pariah with no major allies outside of India besides a laundry list of small and mostly inconsequential countries which had to build up massive forces against both NATO and the People's Republic of China and was still able to go on until internal factional squabbles pulled it all apart.
And the FBU starts off in a much stronger position relative to America and its allies than the OTL USSR did. A much larger economy, control over the more prosperous half of Europe, already having a world wide network of bases and strongpoints (the Soviet Union literally only had any presence in the new world by sheer dumb luck with the Cuban revolution, without which it had little ability to meaningfully threaten America until ICBMs were developed, meanwhile America could easily threaten it from Japan, Turkey and Norway), and also its big hugely populous ally of India not being a civil war, Japanese invasion, and warlord era destroyed crater of a nation unlike China.
Britain and France are also inevitably going to emerge from any major war with Germany and Italy and their friends much better off than the Soviet Union would. Germany and Italy can't really do more than bomb the isle of Britain and the chances of the Axis being able to amass the kind of air superiority over Britain that let the OTL Allies reduce most German metropoles to a crater (or indeed, any kind of significant and lasting air superiority at all) are negligible and there's little reason for Germany and Italy to unleash the same kind of war of annihilation and colonisation against France, the Nordics, and the Low countries that it did upon Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Soviets.
This is NOT the case in REDS! where China, USSR and America are going full tillt population militarization. Europe alone, with its colonies, CANNOT compete against that for more then a few decades.
Obviously so! But your whole post and all your reasoning greatly mistakes what I was talking about. It is not about two blocks in a potlach race to see which one bankrupts the other. It is a political problem the FBU faces, not a military-strategic one. The working masses of the UASR are going to be fabulously wealthy and well off--to a great degree, ironically considering the wealth the former USA has to waste, by being a lot more efficient, but in a humane way that leans the positive human longing for community. Under capitalism people buy and buy in part to try to fill the hole alienation and anomie leaves in their souls; Red America is all about community and camaraderie, with material wealth to make it plush and gold plated. I may be overoptimistic to believe that Latin American Comintern states can quickly surge up to closely approach Red Yank luxury, but that is partially based on noting how appallingly wasteful the bourgeois comprador states are there OTL, and partially on the manner in which rebuilding from wartime devastation enabled the (West) German and Japanese economies, with judicious investment from Uncle Sam, to be in the 1950s able to surge back at tremendous speed. Believing as I do that capitalism has some inefficiencies that are little acknowledged in mainstream western punditry, it follows that a rational and libertarian form of post-capitalism can deliver superior performance.
If in fact it proves difficult for the economies of such places as Central America or Chile to catch up to Yanqui standards, then I expect the ambitious and talented of those countries to emigrate to the UASR; if their homelands stagnate in terms of contributing production, I believe they will, relieved of surplus population and buoyed up by remittances in various forms from the northern powerhouse (much of it in the form of government to government aid) life there will be at least much more tranquil than before, with the wolf of plantation capitalist greed no longer ravening; if they do not in fact develop to match UASR Republics of equivalent population, they will at any rate be safer and happier places to live than OTL. I'm betting they do industrialize, but maybe if that does not happen they can have a special role to play later in developing more ecologically sustainable ways to live well?
In this context, how much or little the Soviet part of the Comintern keeps pace with the Western Hemisphere is almost irrelevant. As with the B scenario for Latin America which I deplore but might prove more reasonable to assert, perhaps the Soviet part of the bloc cannot match American growth and sophistication. Again I bet they can and will, and again if they fail to, I believe aid in various forms will pour over the pole to prop them up anyway. In the productivity worst case (which might not be the humanistically worst case!) perhaps the burden of propping up the lifestyles of half the world might drain enough surplus productivity that North American standards of living do not grow as insanely as OTL US in the Cold War.
But in 1933, the USA was ahead of Europe by many per capita metrics--OTL and in the ATL. American material standards hardly have to grow much to stay at least in step with European working class standards of living--in strict material terms. But as noted there is the whole nonmaterial dimension of American Communism. Essentially, all of American wealth is shared by everyone close to equally; our greatest cities with all their sophisticated amenities and intricate infrastructure, our vast open landscapes, it all belongs to everyone. Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" was bitterly ironic OTL, but here it is literal.
Clearly, the lifestyle of Americans under Communism is just plain superior to that of Europeans under welfare paternalism. This is true even if the UASR winds up doing essentially all the production for Latin America and Russia. But actually I am pretty sure the peoples of those countries will do their part, and American wealth, even with a large part of it being shared out to accelerate the development of the rest of the bloc, will just be deliriously luxuriant. And life in the rest of the Red bloc will be getting visibly better, quite rapidly.
European working classes cannot be allowed to enjoy the freedoms and opportunites they had OTL, under postwar austerity or under neoliberal austerity of the past several decades, let alone in the boom years of the 1960s, and not come to the conclusion the political deal they have with their bourgeois classes is a bill of goods and they can quite easily do better for themselves and there is no valid moral reason not to.
That is the "arms race" the European bourgeoise cannot win, and if they have any prayer of hanging on in the long run, they have to double down on repression, not try to drown the discontents of their workers in pudding. The workers know where to get more and better pudding, if the FBU retains liberal freedoms they do anyway. Those have to be taken away and an Orwellian sense of eternal emergency and fear be cultivated instead; material conditions for the working people can then be kept quite spartan and ramshackle, if the national product is eaten up by an Emergency War God. North Korea shows us how durable a bad regime on those lines can be.
I am not asking for this dystopian outcome for the FBU. I'm saying the plain line of development here is a collapse of the capitalist bloc softer and more humorous than the Soviet bust of OTL, and probably a decade or two earlier. It has little to do with war fighting potential since neither bloc actually wants to trigger nuclear armageddon. It has to do with the FBU being handicapped in the battle for hearts and minds, and the people who take down the bourgie regime will be European proletarians, not Red bloc invaders.
Simply: no. The different economic decisions being made would indicate that while the satisfaction would likely be higher, materially it is likely they wouldn't be able to match the mean of OTL USA. Furthermore, Unlike OTL USA, UASR has a much bigger military and economic commitment to its allies, which in itself would escalate spending far above even OTL US's ballooning budget into something at minimum 15% of its "income". That's even more than OTL US's height of 10% during the Cold War.
The fact you don't take even this sort of simple consideration into your post is indictative that you might want to look at your own thoughts.
Obviously so! But your whole post and all your reasoning greatly mistakes what I was talking about. It is not about two blocks in a potlach race to see which one bankrupts the other. It is a political problem the FBU faces, not a military-strategic one. The working masses of the UASR are going to be fabulously wealthy and well off--to a great degree, ironically considering the wealth the former USA has to waste, by being a lot more efficient, but in a humane way that leans the positive human longing for community. Under capitalism people buy and buy in part to try to fill the hole alienation and anomie leaves in their souls; Red America is all about community and camaraderie, with material wealth to make it plush and gold plated. I may be overoptimistic to believe that Latin American Comintern states can quickly surge up to closely approach Red Yank luxury, but that is partially based on noting how appallingly wasteful the bourgeois comprador states are there OTL, and partially on the manner in which rebuilding from wartime devastation enabled the (West) German and Japanese economies, with judicious investment from Uncle Sam, to be in the 1950s able to surge back at tremendous speed. Believing as I do that capitalism has some inefficiencies that are little acknowledged in mainstream western punditry, it follows that a rational and libertarian form of post-capitalism can deliver superior performance.
If in fact it proves difficult for the economies of such places as Central America or Chile to catch up to Yanqui standards, then I expect the ambitious and talented of those countries to emigrate to the UASR; if their homelands stagnate in terms of contributing production, I believe they will, relieved of surplus population and buoyed up by remittances in various forms from the northern powerhouse (much of it in the form of government to government aid) life there will be at least much more tranquil than before, with the wolf of plantation capitalist greed no longer ravening; if they do not in fact develop to match UASR Republics of equivalent population, they will at any rate be safer and happier places to live than OTL. I'm betting they do industrialize, but maybe if that does not happen they can have a special role to play later in developing more ecologically sustainable ways to live well?
In this context, how much or little the Soviet part of the Comintern keeps pace with the Western Hemisphere is almost irrelevant. As with the B scenario for Latin America which I deplore but might prove more reasonable to assert, perhaps the Soviet part of the bloc cannot match American growth and sophistication. Again I bet they can and will, and again if they fail to, I believe aid in various forms will pour over the pole to prop them up anyway. In the productivity worst case (which might not be the humanistically worst case!) perhaps the burden of propping up the lifestyles of half the world might drain enough surplus productivity that North American standards of living do not grow as insanely as OTL US in the Cold War.
But in 1933, the USA was ahead of Europe by many per capita metrics--OTL and in the ATL. American material standards hardly have to grow much to stay at least in step with European working class standards of living--in strict material terms. But as noted there is the whole nonmaterial dimension of American Communism. Essentially, all of American wealth is shared by everyone close to equally; our greatest cities with all their sophisticated amenities and intricate infrastructure, our vast open landscapes, it all belongs to everyone. Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" was bitterly ironic OTL, but here it is literal.
Clearly, the lifestyle of Americans under Communism is just plain superior to that of Europeans under welfare paternalism. This is true even if the UASR winds up doing essentially all the production for Latin America and Russia. But actually I am pretty sure the peoples of those countries will do their part, and American wealth, even with a large part of it being shared out to accelerate the development of the rest of the bloc, will just be deliriously luxuriant. And life in the rest of the Red bloc will be getting visibly better, quite rapidly.
European working classes cannot be allowed to enjoy the freedoms and opportunites they had OTL, under postwar austerity or under neoliberal austerity of the past several decades, let alone in the boom years of the 1960s, and not come to the conclusion the political deal they have with their bourgeois classes is a bill of goods and they can quite easily do better for themselves and there is no valid moral reason not to.
That is the "arms race" the European bourgeoise cannot win, and if they have any prayer of hanging on in the long run, they have to double down on repression, not try to drown the discontents of their workers in pudding. The workers know where to get more and better pudding, if the FBU retains liberal freedoms they do anyway. Those have to be taken away and an Orwellian sense of eternal emergency and fear be cultivated instead; material conditions for the working people can then be kept quite spartan and ramshackle, if the national product is eaten up by an Emergency War God. North Korea shows us how durable a bad regime on those lines can be.
I am not asking for this dystopian outcome for the FBU. I'm saying the plain line of development here is a collapse of the capitalist bloc softer and more humorous than the Soviet bust of OTL, and probably a decade or two earlier. It has little to do with war fighting potential since neither bloc actually wants to trigger nuclear armageddon. It has to do with the FBU being handicapped in the battle for hearts and minds, and the people who take down the bourgie regime will be European proletarians, not Red bloc invaders.
I'm really disinclined to engage with you if you're going to insist on these extremely long and rambling text walls that come off as kind of smugly self assured about their inherent correctness and more than a little patronising and your habit of multi-posting tends to drag discussion on the thread to a grinding halt through monopolisation of page space.
Also European Feudalism coexisted for literal centuries with British Liberalism even though Britain was pretty objectively wealthier, more prosperous, and more egalitarian than pretty much any part of the continent. It took the Napoleonic Wars to slowly bleed European feudalism's late form to death and the first world war to kill its last vestiges. The feudal overlords of Europe didn't really need to engage in any sort of bread and circuses to discourage people away from the British example, people were generally disinclined to turn society upside down based on the promises of the liberals and many were even outright willing to die for said feudal masters. To go back even further; the proto-liberalism of the Italian merchant states sat alongside the predominant strains of Feudalism for even longer than that and barely made so much as a political hiccup.
Violent upheaval is a hard sell usually only bought by people who feel as though they have nothing to lose or that victory will be guaranteed. If the simple existence of a better way of life was enough to convince people into revolution then state capitalist countries like Saudi Arabia or the DPRK would not exist. They're influenced by the ideology they're subsumed into and there's a significant deal of buying into the system and thus not wanting to let go of it for the uncertainties of "maybe this other way is better" but to suggest that they're all brainwashed sheep too stupid to appreciate how superior other ways of life are is infatilising, orientalist, and kind of racist.
And to paraphrase Zizek, the material effects of ideology are to warp the conceptions of what is and isn't possible until it is so pervasive that it is easier to imagine the apocalypse than the end of the predominant ideology. News companies need very little in the way of state direction to start framing ideology and how people view the world in a certain way; their material interest is to be automatically hostile to anything pushing too leftwards. In the era of post-war mass media and before the existence of the internet these media companies essentially control the entirety of the flow of information the average person gets. And even in the internet era large corporate entities have the power of what sort of content is prioritised in search results, who gets the precious flow of ad or patron money, and even what kind of content the average person is pointed to. The state itself has little need to actively censor information hostile to the predominant ideology when the pressures exerted by media companies will do most of it for them.
Education by both families and schools plays its own part without really trying to be classically repressive, forming biases and presumptions in most people that are difficult to counter without active efforts at providing counter-state services. How many people blithely repeat the idea that Galileo was repressed simply because the spooky Catholic Church was anti-science and insist that this is the truth no matter how much counter-information you throw at them? In fact, going so far as to double down on the objectively incorrect belief as a defense mechanism against what the brain perceives to be a direct attack by the person trying to convince them that they're wrong?
As many prominent left communists have repeatedly stated; Leftists will never get anywhere by trying to convince the proleteriat that their way is better. Leftists within the pre-revolutionary Capitalist system will in fact; play very little role in revolutions and are largely irrelevant to them. Revolutions happen because they must; because the present way of doing things can no longer endure under existing circumstances and the organisation to take advantage of this fumble exists; not because they're tantalising promises or because smart and charismatic leftists are good at proselytising the great ideas of leftism. No more than Christianity spread because it was supposedly a smarter religion than the Indo-European paganisms it replaced while Asian and African native faiths continue to exist to the present largely unconvinced of the supposed theological genius of Christianity or Islam.
I liked, and Liked, this canon post, but I was a bit surprised at the hard line these opening lines expressed. I'm riffing a bit here off my reply to ithilid's post above on the specific topic of mental illness.
This canon post is pretty much what I would expect based on prior TL iterations, but it seemed in the historical buildup to this version's more careful and nuanced step by step approach, that the simple hard line "cops are counterrevolutionary" had been much mitigated, and I seem to recall you saying that actually in the revolutionary crisis itself, a fair number of them came over to the Red side. Which, given the breadth and depth of the general mass revolutionary consensus growing leading up to '33, makes good sense, for much the same reasons that antiracism, feminism, gender flexibility acceptance, and skepticism toward ableism ("differently-able-ism?") is not anachronistic in Reds!'Verse later 1930s. Again it has to do with the very broad base, with millions of real people in real grassroots situations being contributors and credentialed card carrying Reds with aggressively democratic access to post-revolutionary power.
Now broadly speaking, of course the uniformed police of the old regime were, in a sense, to a man committed reactionaries. They were objectively speaking agents and enforcers of The Man, that was in fact their job description. But they were as you have noted more recently in this version, also of the people. And the people were not in fact mesmerized nearly so much as OTL by the hegemonic claims of the established order. Therefore people who were more or less on the lam in the pre-revolutionary decades, especially the endgame last few years, had a lot more aid and comfort than such people would be any time OTL.
The quote is indicative of a kind of semantic shift. "Cop" and "bad cop" are functionally synonymous. It's not a statement of state policy, but it's a saying that is common among the uniformed public safety services. If you compromise the integrity of the unit by being dirty, crooked or violate the rules of engagement, if the courts-martial don't sort you out, your fellow gendarmes will leave you in a shallow grave.
I am sure @Shevek23 didn't mean to appear patronizing or orientalistic or racist in his overly-optimistic portrayals of the "Western Hemispheric Comintern" over the "Soviet Eurasian Comintern" or the Franco-British sphere.
But to take note Shevek, the UASR did invest more heavily in reconstructing a heavily war-torn and physically and materially ruined Comintern after the Second World War and that meant wartime rationing being continued in the UASR and was only slowly being lifted until the late 1950s.
UASR living standards did not match that of the IOTL postwar United States at maybe any point of UASR's postwar history just because of the rather different way of life of Soviet Americans but it didn't mean that living standards are terrible for the vast number of Soviet Americans and with this is the added bonus of a general lack of material poverty conditions even in less affluent regions like the African National Federal Republic. At the same time, the UASR ITTL has a far bigger region to invest in to recover from the war than that of IOTL United States that has no particular interest in seeing the material development of regions outside Western Europe and Japan in its Grand Area of imperial operations.
The Franco-British Union, on the other hand, in its Western European core, corresponds far closer to IOTL US living standards and this is a part of the world that has far less qualms in being enlightened in a "superior way of life" in the UASR and New World Comintern. And Western Europe has all the abilities in making itself a superpower AND maintaining a superpower status.
There are a host of other factors in play in assuring that we will continue to see a continuing Cold War ITTL up to ITTL 2020 and with the capitalist Alliance of Free States in a still capable position to fight back a slow and assured communist expansionism.
To give a very miniscule spoiler, the ITTL communists wouldn't have much of a leeway in very aggressively expand the limits of communist ideology in practice, including territorial expansion, until the 1980s, for all things considered that happened before the decade. And even that more overtly aggressive expansionism, internal and external, wouldn't be completely successful and in fact may even possibly hinder the possibilities of world communist revolution for the foreseeable future, hence the continuing Cold War up to 2020 ITTL. It just assured a capitalist bloc that can maintain itself long-term and is more organizationally stable, for all of the things that will happen in the 1980s ITTL.
Think of it in a Star Trek reference, the insidiousness of the United Federation of Planets. The Federation is definitely this egalitarian technocratic libertarian democratic paradise. But why isn't everybody in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants scrambling their way into joining this mighty paradise, for all of its assurances of equality between members, internal peace and the material socialistic prosperity assured by its replicator technology? The communist bloc can be considered as this Federation and the rest of the world as the rest of the galaxy that doesn't necessarily see the Federation in this benevolent light and even if the rest of the galaxy is a hellhole compared to the paradise of the Federation, the people of the hellhole will be able to find ways in justifying its own existence and trust me, they will and they can and the Federation wouldn't be in a position to convince them otherwise short of military conquest.
That's what the capitalist bloc ITTL is about and in comparison to IOTL, ITTL capitalism is even a far more benevolent system in regards to maintaining a good standard of living to a way vast number of people compared to our neoliberal capitalism.
In one way, even that is not enough in keeping ITTL communism from expanding worldwide. But it doesn't necessarily mean that ITTL capitalism will just collapse that easily.
Honestly if you want to attack the plausibility of the FBU's block, living standards in Europe isn't the way... It's development of the colonies is. The FBU going from purely extractive behaviour to trying to make its colonies useful partners is really what strikes me as the least realistic part.
Honestly if you want to attack the plausibility of the FBU's block, living standards in Europe isn't the way... It's development of the colonies is. The FBU going from purely extractive behaviour to trying to make its colonies useful partners is really what strikes me as the least realistic part.
Even if there's more profit in it, or at least less risk? Historically, the British government has been pretty good at heading off revolution by knowing when to back down and offer just enough meaningful concessions to satisfy everyone but the hardliners.
Even if there's more profit in it, or at least less risk? Historically, the British government has been pretty good at heading off revolution by knowing when to back down and offer just enough meaningful concessions to satisfy everyone but the hardliners.
It's a bit more than appeasement here? That I could buy, but it's outright developing them, which would make them less dependent on the home country.
And my main problem is how early it has to start to make the difference needed for the TL to work. IF they just start after the US revolution, it wouldn't be enough to make the UK stand by itself in the world war. I could definitely buy them switching gears towards building up colonial capitalist elites as the cold war starts, but it's way too late.
It feels a bit like they're handed the genius ball just because the comintern will need a strong opponent to make the story stand beyond the world war. It's not too jarring, but I'd like to at least read about how that shift of attitude happen rather than just have it dropped as a justification for the AFS working.
Though I guess it's a natural consequence of the TL being America focused.
And my main problem is how early it has to start to make the difference needed for the TL to work. IF they just start after the US revolution, it wouldn't be enough to make the UK stand by itself in the world war. I could definitely buy them switching gears towards building up colonial capitalist elites as the cold war starts, but it's way too late.
Well, it depends on how you look at things. Just two factors can have massive consequences.
(1) OTL, UK and the Empire did stand mostly by itself until the US actually entered the war, and it should be remembered that paying for American goods was what led to the LL and eventual near default during the postwar period. Here, the Empire gets two massive breaks where they aren't restricted by the WW1 debts nor have to go into debt during WW2. All of this does mean "excess" capital that needs to be spent somewhere...... and assuming the Americas are out of question, it's back to the Old World.
(2) UK was pouring massive treasures into China during the Nanking Decade and into 1939. With the different trajectory of Chiang's "Red Napoleon" career, most of those investments would have been moving elsewhere.... and where do you think they might be utilized?
I think it's been discussed back in Discord that the American revolution of 1933 has been a major plot point for the Franco-British elites to switch into an Imperial Japan model of colonial development of "model colonies" like Formosa and Korea. There is also the U.S. colonial development project on the Philippine Islands to look up to and the colonial relationship between that of France and Senegal that's already been in existence ITTL at the time of the 1933 revolution. It's not that impossible of a switch to be done. And it's not been done immediately after 1933 either. There's been much of kicking and screaming on the part of the motherland elites that took DECADES and quite a resistance movement on the part of the colonial elites AND liberation movements before all of this became consensus, post-war. Or at least apparent to have become a consensus policy.
The development of the colonies is not something that started out as a deliberate colonial policy on the part of the Franco-British elites. It's just that the circumstances and the relationship between the colonies and the Franco-British mother countries by 1945 had become so altered that the extractive colonialism that the FBU wanted to return back to after 1945 cannot be done anymore.
It was made possible by the effects of the war on the Indian subcontinent that was alluded to back in old updates in AH.com when Japan invaded Bengal, which seems to be going to remain cannon. The policies on India got quite a pull in making similar policies be done on Africa. And remember, before it started in India. it's being done on limited amounts on Africa already. Even BEFORE the war.
And it's not so apparent of a postwar colonial policy as well until mid-Cold War when it became obvious that large parts of the African continent will be turning Red. You saw yourself what parts of the continent it will be.
Edit: With Sumeragi's points, there is the effect of the 1933 revolution on relieving Franco-British war debt and by the fact that much of UASR's aid to the FBU by the time of the World Revolutionary War will be more of "in-kind" aid without the financial burdens of OTL war aid. And of course, China.
China was moving in a different direction ITTL since the foundation of the Republic. And it's a direction that the capitalist West is not taking kindly. Without the OTL investments that the West was giving China, it provided a space for such investments to be given to .... Japan and then to the colonies.
Well, it depends on how you look at things. Just two factors can have massive consequences.
(1) OTL, UK and the Empire did stand mostly by itself until the US actually entered the war, and it should be remembered that paying for American goods was what led to the LL and eventual near default during the postwar period. Here, the Empire gets two massive breaks where they aren't restricted by the WW1 debts nor have to go into debt during WW2. All of this does mean "excess" capital that needs to be spent somewhere...... and assuming the Americas are out of question, it's back to the Old World.
(2) UK was pouring massive treasures into China during the Nanking Decade and into 1939. With the different trajectory of Chiang's "Red Napoleon" career, most of those investments would have been moving elsewhere.... and where do you think they might be utilized?
I think it's been discussed back in Discord that the American revolution of 1933 has been a major plot point for the Franco-British elites to switch into an Imperial Japan model of colonial development of "model colonies" like Formosa and Korea.
My point is that 33 is too late already. If they only shift in 33, by the time WW2 start, they're toast. Britain can't stand alone. This has to be as Sumeragi says, a shift around WW1. The problem is more that the TL doesn't talk about it than anything, honestly.
I don't remember a shift in colonial development policy starting around World War I on the part of the British Empire, honestly. There may be some subtle shifts that's not been discussed deeply as part of the butterfly effect but I do not remember any conscious shifts in policy at all in that early part of the timeline. And if 1933 is too late for you, I am actually arguing that the policy on the independent economic development of politically-independent Commonwealth dominions did not fully manifest as a conscious consensus Cold War-oriented foreign policy on the part of the Franco-British Union until the 1960s at the very least, when institution of such independent economic policies are all said and done by the former colonies.
For risk of bringing some miniscule spoilers, the full-blown internal development of the colonies has never been fully accepted by the Franco-British elites but geopolitical realities forced the Franco-British Union into such a situation well in the era when such independent economics has been bearing fruit in the dominions. And as been discussed, the development of the dominions is actually beneficial on the part of the Franco-British Union; politically, economically, militarily, even when it was not made apparent before. Even the elites in the colonies know that their respective nationalistic capitalisms is dependent on a security relationship with Western Europe, of which Western Europe still call the shots and the former colonies remain subordinate or on a junior partner status. Everybody ITTL knows that the fall of Western Europe to communism means an effective end of the Cold War. The economic dynamics within capitalism ITTL may change into a more egalitarian relationship between the old mother countries and the colonies but at the end of it all, the core of world capitalism remains in Britain and France. It's part of why there will be no "Third Worldist" capitalist ideology ITTL that seriously considers shifting the balance of power within world capitalism from Western Europe to the "Global South". All of the ruling nationalist ideologies in the capitalist bloc tilts their foreign policy towards London and Paris. The elites in the Global South know that their way of life is dependent on maintaining a geopolitical and economic core in Western Europe, for all of the internal economic development that happened in the colonies. India remains a gigantic UK-Japan to the Franco-British Union/Western Europe being the United States in terms of the security relationship. And this is with India being the largest economy in the world by TTL's 2020.
