#maybe the ussr didn’t collapse? or even maybe east germany remains there.

[saucetail-hasanewblog]

I’m thinking about setting my original story in an alternate history world. Is this Weird. Because like, I don’t think I’m going to comment a lot about it but it just struck me that this is something I could very much do.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Alternate History scenarios I want to see

I’m tired of the same two scenarios, the South wins the Civil War, Nazis win World War II.  There’s no more blood to be pulled from those stones, they’re completely dry, completely played up.  At best they’re just generic, at worst they’re conservative wish fulfillment.  ¡No mas!  For the love of God, just give us some scenarios we haven’t seen before, some scenarios that postulate a better world instead of a worse one.

If you have to do the Civil War, let Lincoln survive, let him oversee Reconstruction.  Let the South remain under military occupation, get rid of the Compromise of 1877, get rid of Jim Crow laws, enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.  The Civil Rights movement would have occurred fifty or sixty years earlier.

What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand was never assassinated?  Tensions were boiling over in the Balkans, something was bound to happen eventually, his death was just the final straw; if he survived though, the resulting war wouldn’t be nearly as catastrophic, instead being tantamount to a Third Balkan War between Austria and Serbia.  Germany and Russia and France probably wouldn’t even get involved, it would be contained to the peninsula and be over by Christmas 1914.  The resulting post-war world would be so different from our own it would be near impossible to imagine; no carving up the Middle East, no rise of authoritarianism in Russia and Italy and Germany and China, no Holocaust, no Cold War, no baby boom, etc.

1939, Albert Einstein never signs the Szilard Letter to President Roosevelt, so the Manhattan project never gets off the ground.  The Nazis were not developing atom bombs, the American nuclear program was predicated on a lie (as most of our foreign policy decisions are).  If we never develop the bomb, there’s no arms race, no Cold War, no crimes against humanity by the US against Japan, no looming threat of nuclear war at all times.  Maybe the Soviets would have developed the bomb eventually, but the US wouldn’t be the first, and we wouldn’t be as aggressive over out stockpile as we were through the 20th century.

The arrest and trial of Adolf Hitler; what if the Western Front had reached Berlin before the East?  What if we’d been able to capture him alive and try him at Nuremberg with the rest of the Reich?  He doesn’t get the satisfaction of a quick ending, his crimes are aired to the world, his few remaining supporters finally see him as a man instead of a god.  He’d be hanged, cremated, and disposed of in the Pegnitz River.  The Western allies would have been in a stronger position and could probably have maintained control of a united Germany rather than letting the East fall under Russia’s sphere of influence.  That’d be a scenario in and of itself; what if Germany was never divided?  No Berlin Wall, a smaller Iron Curtain, no far-right parties in the Bundestag, etc.

Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested for trying to assassinate Major General Edwin Walker in April 1963. He never assassinates John F. Kennedy, who wins re-election in 1964.  He passes the Civil Rights Act (though it might be harder in this timeline because he’s a northerner; Johnson was able to pass it because he convinced his fellow southerners to stop filibustering it), he oversees and deescalates Vietnam, eases relations with the Soviet Union and China, advancing geopolitics by five or even ten years.

The impeachment of Richard Nixon; he resigned because he had lost all support, even from his own party (something that would never happen today).  If he had tried to fight the charges instead, he would have been removed from office and subsequently tried in criminal court.  Gerald Ford was chosen as Vice President in part because he was seen as an honest politician at the time, in comparison to the outgoing Agnew who was embroiled in his own scandal; when Ford pardoned Nixon, his credibility tanked.  If Nixon was found guilty by Congress, I don’t think Ford would have pardoned him (well, he probably still would have because Republicans are the party of corruption, but a man can dream, can’t he?)  This would have finally set the concrete precedent that the president is not above the law, that they can and will face consequences for their actions.

The assassination of Ronald Reagan; what if John Hinckley Jr. had succeeded in killing Reagan in March 1981?  Full offense to any and all conservative pieces of shit reading this, but the world would be an infinitely better place.  No Reagan means no Iran-Contra Affair and no Reaganomics (no trickle down), which means no tax cuts for the super-wealthy and no trillion dollar monopolies.  There would still be a middle class, we’d have higher wages and more benefits, we’d have universal healthcare like every single other developed nation on the planet!  In 1980, George H.W. Bush called Reagan’s policies “voodoo economics” because he knew they wouldn’t work; he only got on board after he started cashing his checks.  If he became president in ‘81 rather than ‘89, he wouldn’t have continued those policies (he was more concerned with the foreign than the domestic agenda).  No Reagan means no AIDS crisis, or at least a substantially reduced one.  No Reagan means no Mujahideen in Afghanistan, so no Taliban, no al-Qaeda, no 9/11, no endless War on Terror in the Middle East, no PATRIOT Act, no Orwellian police state.  THIS is the biggest change I can imagine in the last 50 years.

What if Glasnost and Perestroika has succeeded in the Soviet Union?  What if the USSR had democratized under Gorbachev’s reforms?  The Russia that came out of the collapse was corrupt to the core trying to fill the sudden power vacuum, which is how Putin rose to the top.  If Gorbachev’s reforms had succeeded, if the Soviet Union had modernized, if a true multi-party democracy had been established, the world would be a better place.  The Iron Curtain would still have fallen because Gorbachev got rid of the Brezhnev Doctrine, meaning Eastern Europe would be free of Soviet influence sooner, the Caucuses and Central Asian republics would have more say in how the country was run, and authoritarianism would be on the decline in Russia.

Al Gore wins the 2000 election; if he had become president, we would never have gone to war with Iraq.  Hell, we may even have avoided war with Afghanistan; the Taliban claimed they were willing to extradite Osama bin Laden if we could prove his involvement in 9/11, and I think Gore would have taken them up on the offer.  Now there’s no saying they actually would have followed through with it, but it’s always better to try diplomacy first.  Even if we DID end up going to war with Afghanistan, it would be shorter and less deadly; fewer civilian casualties, an actual exit strategy, and no power vacuum because we’d never topple their government just to secure oil and military contracts.  No Iraq War means no Syrian Civil War, which means no ISIS.

If you’re going through the trouble of researching and writing an alternate history scenario, why one Earth would you would you just fart out the same story we’ve heard a million times before?  Give us some obscure changes, something small, something niche that would have a domino effect on World History.  Like, what if Austria had won the Austro-Prussian war, and the German Empire didn’t exist?  What if the Norman conquest had been repelled by the Celts?  What if Margaret Thatcher slipped on wet concrete and bashed her head in on the way to Number 10?  There are so many better possibilities to write about than Confederates and Nazis!