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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

Norseman said:
THAT is the problem. The ability of the A4 to maintain a head of rage and determination to spend ludicrous amounts of money on the military against no clear threat. And the ability of them to view the deindustrialized, beaten down, depopulated (and it would be, because holy shit any German with any skills would have tried to emigrate anywhere) Germanies as still being a threat of any sort.
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AANW really looks even more like AH's own version of TBO in that regard. The postwar world in both has...

  • Super-advanced hyper power with super-tech brought about for some handwavy reason.
  • Said super-tech consists of superweapons the author likes.
  • Prospective rivals are economically and/or politically neutralized.
  • The "enemies" of the hyper-powe being crushed into extremely dubious mustache twirlers (see the TBO "Caliphate" or AANW's China).
 
If you guys do do a new thread for it, please link it here.
 
lordhen said:
Am i bad saying Calbear TL called The Anglo/American – Nazi War is the most cringeworthy Alternate History i ever have read, sometimes i feel it only keeps going on AH.com is due Calbear being a mod there, if it was written by anybody else he would (that is how i think) would be banned.
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The TL is very brutal, the PoD (Wehrmacht takes Stalingrad, Stalin goes MAD because it's HIS city, executes all competent Soviet generals) is admittedly contrived which even CalBear lampshaded, and you can wonder whether the Anglo-Americans would be willing to reconquer Europe for such a long time. Still, not the worst.
 
Norseman said:
Ten years passes.

1970. No change.

Ten years passes.

1980. No change.

Ten years passes.

1990. No change.

THAT is the problem. The ability of the A4 to maintain a head of rage and determination to spend ludicrous amounts of money on the military against no clear threat. And the ability of them to view the deindustrialized, beaten down, depopulated (and it would be, because holy shit any German with any skills would have tried to emigrate anywhere) Germanies as still being a threat of any sort.
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You really think the Allies are just gonna forgive and forget while clear evidence of the Nazis' crimes continues to exist?
 
Silent Runner said:
You really think the Allies are just gonna forgive and forget while clear evidence of the Nazis' crimes continues to exist?
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I don't think it matters if they forgive and forget. What matters is if a democracy is capable of maintaining a head of anger and iron determination for decades on end. The idea of them still being able to maintain the same level of iron determination forty years later is absurd.

By 1993 (assuming similar demographics) half the population of the USA would have been born after the end of the war. Something like 60% would, in that year, be too young to remember the war having been children at the time. By 2000 that rises to 72% being either born after the war or being young children during it.

And at no point no one asks "Dude? How the **** is Germany supposed to become a threat again? They got no real industry. They have gone through decades of brain-drain. They got no military cadre to speak of. Can they piss gasoline and shit bullets now?" And any talk about war-crimes can be met with, "Dude! Even if they are like super-evil it doesn't matter, they don't have shit to start a war with, and they can't build shit to start a war with. They can't piss gasoline and shit bullets! Why am I being taxed to my gills to protect the world from these losers?"
 
Norseman said:
I don't think it matters if they forgive and forget. What matters is if a democracy is capable of maintaining a head of anger and iron determination for decades on end. The idea of them still being able to maintain the same level of iron determination forty years later is absurd.

By 1993 (assuming similar demographics) half the population of the USA would have been born after the end of the war. Something like 60% would, in that year, be too young to remember the war having been children at the time. By 2000 that rises to 72% being either born after the war or being young children during it.
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You act like the older generations wouldn't indoctrinate their kids relentlessly.
 
Silent Runner said:
You act like the older generations wouldn't indoctrinate their kids relentlessly.
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So please explain to me how the relentlessly indoctrinating, incredibly militarized and overtly imperialist A4 have any positive traits? In any even vaguely realistic setting they would be crumbling, oligarchic and xenophobic shitholes. They would have long nuked China, India and every other possible competitor. The cringe is not what they do to Germany but how they are presented as non-racist good guys who have a slight control tick.
 
I mean, historically the track record of post-WWII generations of parents trying to indoctrinate their children into sharing their foreign policy preferences has been pretty mixed.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I mean, historically the track record of post-WWII generations of parents trying to indoctrinate their children into sharing their foreign policy preferences has been pretty mixed.
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Bingo. You know what Umberto Eco wrote about this? He actually grew up in fascist Italy; he had to write essays about how much he loved the Duce and prayed for him (fascist virtue signalling); but at the same time, he asked himself "Why am I doing this? I don't actually pray for the Duce..."

At the end, he became Italy' greatest post-WW2 left/liberal intellectual. (And certainly neither a Commie nor an "intellectual yet idiot".)
 
And at the other end of the scale, I've heard people seriously and unironically contend that Germans are genetically predisposed towards fascism. So like Simon said, mixed results.
 
Silent Runner said:
You act like the older generations wouldn't indoctrinate their kids relentlessly.
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Simon_Jester said:
I mean, historically the track record of post-WWII generations of parents trying to indoctrinate their children into sharing their foreign policy preferences has been pretty mixed.
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In a word: Socialism. Young people in America today are embracing socialism, one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination calls himself a democratic socialist. This despite the cold war, the Red Scares, and basically decades of indoctrination that never really ended.

You would be amazed at how fast indoctrination fails when there are pressing, practical reasons for stuff, such as: "Why are we spending this much money on this shit? Why can't we take some of that money and spend it on stuff that is actually useful?" And again, "Why exactly do we have to be so scared of an impoverished, low industry country with massive emigration and serious brain drain? Will they start to piss gasoline and shit bullets? German mothers giving birth to little panther tanks?"

Because seriously the Germanies would have a steady population decline from ... well despair, lack of a good future, emigration and brain drain, on a scale that'd make Russias look like a gentle walk in the park. I was not kidding when I said "population of 50 million and declining."

Anchises said:
So please explain to me how the relentlessly indoctrinating, incredibly militarized and overtly imperialist A4 have any positive traits? In any even vaguely realistic setting they would be crumbling, oligarchic and xenophobic shitholes. They would have long nuked China, India and every other possible competitor. The cringe is not what they do to Germany but how they are presented as non-racist good guys who have a slight control tick.
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I think at the very least their attempts to make railguns would have failed miserably, because we are still having trouble with that and it does not seem to be the sort of technology likely to start working by throwing money at it. Technological interconnectivity and limits to engineering do not go away just because you throw money at it.
 
Max Sinister said:
Bingo. You know what Umberto Eco wrote about this? He actually grew up in fascist Italy; he had to write essays about how much he loved the Duce and prayed for him (fascist virtue signalling); but at the same time, he asked himself "Why am I doing this? I don't actually pray for the Duce..."

At the end, he became Italy' greatest post-WW2 left/liberal intellectual. (And certainly neither a Commie nor an "intellectual yet idiot".)
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Right, though I'm specifically going into the question of foreign policy preferences like "is it worth sending American ground troops to fight communism in a proxy war or not?" The generation of WWI veterans who were leaders in the WWII and immediate post-WWII era thought "yes," the baby boomers by 1970 pretty clearly thought "no."
 
Norseman said:
I think at the very least their attempts to make railguns would have failed miserably, because we are still having trouble with that and it does not seem to be the sort of technology likely to start working by throwing money at it. Technological interconnectivity and limits to engineering do not go away just because you throw money at it.
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At the very least. I mean the Soviet Union didn't even manage Stealth technology and the ratio of military spending to GDP they had probably is better than the A4's one.

Personally I think the A4 would be stuck at an 80s tech level in 2017. Europe is toast and China is a giant hermit kingdom. India taking China's role doesn't really make sense in that context because the factors that allowed China's rise are very much absent.

Kinetic weapons on the moon?!?! Please, the A4 would simply have a shit ton of missiles with conventional, chemical and nuclear warheads. Contrary to armchair historian logic a cancerous MIC tends to produce very conservative results. Why would Boeing-Lockhead-Raytheon be interested in building kinetic space weapons (apart from lacking the necessary technological base)? Just build 1.500 Tomahawk missiles.
 
Anchises said:
At the very least. I mean the Soviet Union didn't even manage Stealth technology and the ratio of military spending to GDP they had probably is better than the A4's one.

Personally I think the A4 would be stuck at an 80s tech level in 2017. Europe is toast and China is a giant hermit kingdom. India taking China's role doesn't really make sense in that context because the factors that allowed China's rise are very much absent.

Kinetic weapons on the moon?!?! Please, the A4 would simply have a shit ton of missiles with conventional, chemical and nuclear warheads. Contrary to armchair historian logic a cancerous MIC tends to produce very conservative results. Why would Boeing-Lockhead-Raytheon be interested in building kinetic space weapons (apart from lacking the necessary technological base)? Just build 1.500 Tomahawk missiles.
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They might try to sell such a program as a massive, guaranteed money pit but that doesn't mean they'd pull it off.
 
Norseman said:
There is no rational reason for them to gain power in the AANW verse either. The reason we got them in North Korea was that basically they turned Imperial Japaneseism into communism, changed the Emperor into the Kims, and made Koreans the master race. The dynamics just aren't the same in China! It's this weird hatred of China that is just absurd.
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The Cleanest Race is not exactly the most accurate book.


AANW: We're talking about a literal boomer stuck in the 1970s with his utterly racist views of East Asia and whatnot. It's obvious why all of his writings fall apart when you just poke it. Absolutely bad research, absolutely bad premise, absolutely garbage pose.
 
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