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

Hawkatana said:
Okay to be fair, western Europe is balkanised. But America still isn't (and even has colonies in Siberia, Taiwan, Sakhalin, Hokkaido, Svalbard, Antarctica, Greenland and Scotland) so your point stands.
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I won't defend this specific TL but I feel like the US maintaining cohesion while the rest of the world collapses is eminently defensible. The United States isn't magically immune to state collapse but we do have numerous geographical and resource advantages that give us a fighting chance.

Firstly, the ocean. The US is enormously isolated from the rest of the world. To invade the US you need to cross several oceans, we could disband the navy entirely and it would still be enormously difficult. This doesn't insulate us from all hypothetical state destroyers but it does mean that the most immediate and dangerous security threats are essentially unable to harm us. Russia and Europe have to deal with the risks of major wars, the US essentially has no threats with no neighbors capable of meaningfully threatening it.

Furthermore our resources, we're almost an entire continent to ourselves. The sheer number of resources at our disposal is incredible, and that's going to exist regardless of how bad things are globally. Even in a climate disaster or some similar global catastrophe the US will have the resources to at least survive it. Russia also has valuable resources but with only a 1/3rd of our population and significantly worse extractive ability.

If any nation could survive a global catastrophe it would be the US. None of this is to argue that the US would just skip through unaffected or that state collapse is impossible, but it would be a mistake to ignore the incredible advantages the US has that other major powers do not. Like all things execution matters and clearly this timeline didn't pull it off but a timeline where the US is the winner (relatively speaking) could easily be good if the writer isn't a hack.
 
King Washington said:
Oh boy

Were Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia really that bad?

It is the general consensus that Nicholas was a stubborn fool and consistently failed to read the room until it was too late. Alexandra is also portrayed as being domineering, harsh, and paranoid, not to mention she was easily manipulated by Rasputin. I’m not playing revisionist, but could the...
www.alternatehistory.com
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Oooh, ooh, I can answer this one.

Yes. Yes, they were.
 
Sandy River DL said:
Literally any work in which the Contiguous United States gets invaded and occupied by German and/or Japanese forces during WWII. Unless you're working with a TL with massive divergences during the 18th or 19th centuries, there's no butterflying things enough to negate the ridiculous industrial and manpower advantages held by the US.
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Well, what about Wolfenstein-esque timelines, where Ghostapo or/and Stupid Jetpack Hitler are actually a thing?
 
King Washington said:
Oh boy

Were Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia really that bad?

It is the general consensus that Nicholas was a stubborn fool and consistently failed to read the room until it was too late. Alexandra is also portrayed as being domineering, harsh, and paranoid, not to mention she was easily manipulated by Rasputin. I’m not playing revisionist, but could the...
www.alternatehistory.com
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Best possible response is on the first page
I think if Rasputin really had the ability to hypnotize them and turn them into his puppets, the Russian Empire might have survived longer.
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Nick was a convinced Autocrat and raging antisemite atop being an incompetent in well over his head. And I reiterate how he was worth far more to Anti-Communism dead than alive.

ETA: An argument can be made that Alix of Hesse had less power/influence over the running of things than some of her detractors said, but her stances and personality made her a net drag on the Monarchy as well
 
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I'm pretty sure Nicholas is the guy who was so opposed to constitutionalism that he refused to sign off on any constitutional reform until one of his uncles literally threatened to commit suicide in front of him if he didn't do it.
 
King Washington said:
Oh boy

Were Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia really that bad?

It is the general consensus that Nicholas was a stubborn fool and consistently failed to read the room until it was too late. Alexandra is also portrayed as being domineering, harsh, and paranoid, not to mention she was easily manipulated by Rasputin. I’m not playing revisionist, but could the...
www.alternatehistory.com
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Nicholas was highly incompetent. He frequently took decisions more appropriate for lower-ranking officials.
 
It's probably not that much of an exaggeration to suggest that had the Whites gotten their hands on the Romanovs before their executions, even the few committed monarchist factions left in the Whites would likely have shot them too.
 
About the only good decision Nicky 2 made was keeping Rasputin around to look after Alexei, and even then he screwed up by not telling anyone why this random peasant mystic was allowed around the royal family, leading directly to the belief it was because Rasputin and Alexandra were fucking.
 
Andrensath said:
About the only good decision Nicky 2 made was keeping Rasputin around to look after Alexei, and even then he screwed up by not telling anyone why this random peasant mystic was allowed around the royal family, leading directly to the belief it was because Rasputin and Alexandra were ....
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In fact, only two cases of Rasputin visiting the sick Tsarevich are known. Apparently, the idea that he helped treat the boy is also exaggerated. Rasputin's duties were only possible in the "Spiritual Instructions" for the imperial couple.

Now let's talk about the cons:
Yes, but it was not big enough to eliminate the land crisis. BTW, a set of the labor laws introduced by AIII and NII was quite impressive by the contemporary standards and, contrary to a popular cliche, industrial proletariat was not a leading force in 1917.
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These Russian rightists have reached AH.
 
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Comrade Future said:
In fact, only two cases of Rasputin visiting the sick Tsarevich are known. Apparently, the idea that he helped treat the boy is also exaggerated. Rasputin's duties were only possible in the "Spiritual Instructions" for the imperial couple.

Now let's talk about the cons:

These Russian rightists have reached AH.
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In fact, there's a sizeable alternate history community in Russia.
 
All this Eugenic Wars talk is reminding me of that ancient AH.Com timeline... shame it was never organized and so is a slog to wade through.

But moving to the current topic - yeah Nicholas was a truly abysmal ruler and a terrible person to boot. He was (at minimum):
- Highly incompetent - Figes's description of how he ran his administration is incredibly revealing and is so like the breed of micromanagers can cause even the best organiations to grind to a halt if left unchecked. The only thing I'll say in his defence here is that his father did not prepare him properly to be tsar (and by that I mean basically at all). However that's tempered by the fact that he never seems to have shown any curiousity about becoming an effective ruler and crucially he never seems to have learnt from his mistakes. Which was a crucial difference between Nicholas and other rulers who had rocky starts but then found their feet. (The quintessential example in my opinion of this is Basil II but there are probably others.
- He was, even by the standards of the time, extremely racist and anti-semitic. And this wasn't just a morality question either - his racism against the Japanese clearly led to his regime underestimating the Japanese in the run-up to 1904 with disastrous results.
- There were at least a few occasions where he openly admitted that he wasn't up to the task of running the empire and yet he never considered, except in 1905, with you know, having someone else doing the actual administration while he focused on the ceremonial side. (And at least early in his reign, there were people who could have fulfilled that - most notably Witte.)

The only real redeeming feature of Nicholas is that he was a devoted father and husband but I think this quote from Pax Britannica sums up the proper response to that nicely: "But so what? How low does the bar have to be to make man-loves-family an accomplishment? Did serial wife-murderer Henry VIII throw off our expectations for a king so much that if they show a basic human concern it can be hailed as an accomplishment?"

There was some really tragic parts of Nicholas's life - particularly with regards to his son - and his death but ultimately, Nicholas was vastly more often the victimizer than the victim.
 
Ed Donnell said:
In fact, there's a sizeable alternate history community in Russia.
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I know this - I regularly communicate with many of them. I mean that they have reached the English-language AH-forum. In my experience of communication, most of them are not particularly eager to register on English-language and international resources.
 
Comrade Future said:
In fact, only two cases of Rasputin visiting the sick Tsarevich are known. Apparently, the idea that he helped treat the boy is also exaggerated. Rasputin's duties were only possible in the "Spiritual Instructions" for the imperial couple.
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TBF isn't general consensus he did help him but only by telling the doctors to stop giving the hemophilic child fucking aspirin
 
I suspect, aside from simple laziness, is the issue that people don't just want a TL where Russia is simply monarchist; they want a Russia that is specifically a turbo-authoritarian christian hellhole where not an iota of ground is given to the liberals.

Which is why you don't really have TLs where the Borki disaster straight up wiped out Alexander III and his family and the Vladimirvichs take the throne, or where Nicholas and Alexandra die after Alexei is born and Mikhail serves as regent; because while Vladimir and Mikhail were themselves fairly staunch conservatives to say the least; simple necessitiy or their own interpretations (or just hating high society in Mikhail's case) would probably have led to them signing off on the reforms plenty of liberal monarchists tried to save the Tzardom with much earlier and, while probably willfully abusing the new rules, wouldn't have backpeddled quite so openly or ineptly as Nicky did. Hence why so many people willing to die on the hill that Nicholas could have succeeded as an Autocrat but for X* ignore those options among others, because the monarchy would have had to change from the mystique the Romanovs (and Hohenzollerns to an extent**) seem to have with conservatives.

*I mean, I'll grant that had Nicholas nutted up and committed to a course of action one way or the other for once in his miserable inbred life come the February revolution; it might have taken longer for the army and bureaucracy to basically mutiny on him to save their own hides and might have bought his family their lives in exile rather than a firing squad in Yekaterinburg; but there was no saving the monarchy.

**The Habsburgs have a measure of popularity among conservative alt history writers of course, but for some reason I always got the impression they were derided as being too liberal for alot of that crowd; either because they were Catholics, because they didn't kiss up to the Nazis the way the Hohenzollerns and other German royals did, or because the cynical pragmatism with regards to some of their ethnic minorities (i've seen more than a bit of whining about them letting the Ukrainians and Poles have any linguistic freedoms. Can't imagine who might be doing the whining /s)
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
I won't defend this specific TL but I feel like the US maintaining cohesion while the rest of the world collapses is eminently defensible. The United States isn't magically immune to state collapse but we do have numerous geographical and resource advantages that give us a fighting chance.

Firstly, the ocean. The US is enormously isolated from the rest of the world. To invade the US you need to cross several oceans, we could disband the navy entirely and it would still be enormously difficult. This doesn't insulate us from all hypothetical state destroyers but it does mean that the most immediate and dangerous security threats are essentially unable to harm us. Russia and Europe have to deal with the risks of major wars, the US essentially has no threats with no neighbors capable of meaningfully threatening it.

Furthermore our resources, we're almost an entire continent to ourselves. The sheer number of resources at our disposal is incredible, and that's going to exist regardless of how bad things are globally. Even in a climate disaster or some similar global catastrophe the US will have the resources to at least survive it. Russia also has valuable resources but with only a 1/3rd of our population and significantly worse extractive ability.

If any nation could survive a global catastrophe it would be the US. None of this is to argue that the US would just skip through unaffected or that state collapse is impossible, but it would be a mistake to ignore the incredible advantages the US has that other major powers do not. Like all things execution matters and clearly this timeline didn't pull it off but a timeline where the US is the winner (relatively speaking) could easily be good if the writer isn't a hack.
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I could have agree with this statement...

If it wasn't for the fact that the TL saw United States being invaded by China and Duginist Russia on both sides of the coast that saw the President of the United States being killed in the first day of the invasion, them invaders establishing an state-wide death camps and having no allies to begin with because of China and Duginist Russia managing to steamroll all of America's European and Asian allies at the start of the war.

The reason America in the TL barely survives from the war that ended in an outright (limited) nuclear war is because of a guy decided that copying of the people running The City in Sleepless Domain is an good idea for an nation that is on the verge of collapse from dual invasion.
 
Admiral Halsey said:
TBF isn't general consensus he did help him but only by telling the doctors to stop giving the hemophilic child ........ aspirin
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Yes, I heard such a version. It is also assumed that he could really calm the boy down and persuade him to reduce the number of examinations. Alas - hemophilia was not treated at all at that time.

king of hybrids said:
I suspect, aside from simple laziness, is the issue that people don't just want a TL where Russia is simply monarchist; they want a Russia that is specifically a turbo-authoritarian christian hellhole where not an iota of ground is given to the liberals.
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In fact, most Russian-language, literate and realistic timelines of monarchical Russia still describe it as a constitutional monarchy.
 
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king of hybrids said:
**The Habsburgs have a measure of popularity among conservative alt history writers of course, but for some reason I always got the impression they were derided as being too liberal for alot of that crowd; either because they were Catholics, because they didn't kiss up to the Nazis the way the Hohenzollerns and other German royals did, or because the cynical pragmatism with regards to some of their ethnic minorities (i've seen more than a bit of whining about them letting the Ukrainians and Poles have any linguistic freedoms. Can't imagine who might be doing the whining /s)
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I wonder what might make the far-right hate the least antisemitic major power in ww1. A true mystery./s
 
Axslashel said:
I wonder what might make the far-right hate the least antisemitic major power in ww1. A true mystery./s
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One of the main reasons I maintain a soft spot for the Habsburgs is that they were relatively pro-Jews, if only because they thought Jews would be more loyal to Austria-Hungary than the other ethnic groups in the Empire (who increasingly wanted to join or create a country for their particularly ethnicity). I honestly think it would be interesting to read a good WI where Franz Ferdinand became Emperor and managed to actually create the United States of Greater Austria, a proposal to federalize the Empire.
 
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