Entry: One year Sep 23, 2004



Almost exactly a year ago, I've reviewed the (then) latest work of alternative history by Harry Turtledove. Well, Turtledove has finished the next volume of the saga: Settling Accounts: Return Engagement. The story begins where The Victorious Opposition left off: at the start of WWII in the alternate universe where the Confederacy won the Civil War.

This book (the first of three) covers the war from June 1941 to June 1942. In the first months, the Confederates catch the U.S. unprepared with its blitzkrieg, resulting in a strategic disaster: the Confederate army reaches Lake Erie, cutting the country in half. Confederate President Jake Featherston offeres a "peace" that is tantamount to surrender, which the U.S. Presdient Al Smith refuses. The war goes on.

The major difference between Turtledove's world and our own is that in his story, it is much harder to find a side to cheer for. The United States has placed the mormons in Utah and English-speaking Canadians under brutal occupation. The Confederacy has placed blacks in concentration camps and begun a policy of extermination. This is not quite the Eastern front of WWII (one Soviet dissident said that that war was fought for the right to sit in your own, rather than the enemy's, concentration camp, and to try to spread that camp over the entire world), but the U.S. is far from having the moral high ground of the sort that it had in the real WWII.

One question that I don't see an answer to right now is this: Eventually, Turtledove is likely to give the U.S. the victory. But the question is, how? The country has been cut in half in the MidWest. Occupied Canada has few routes of transportation, and Canadian terrorists bomb them. In our world, Germany lost WWII (as well as WWI) for one reason: it was fighting on two fronts, and so lost on both. In this war, the U.S. and Imperial Germany are allies (France, having lost WWI, became fascist). But Germany is fighting Britain, France, and Russia. So Germany coming to aid its U.S. ally is unlikely. I hope it will be less than a year before the next book comes out. I don't know if waiting I can wait that long.

Oh, and one more thing: to those who wish the Confederacy had won in the Civil War: read the books. If you think the scenario they describe is likely, tell me how that world is better than our own. If you think it's unlikely, tell me why.

THE SOUTH WAS WRONG.
   1 comments

Vijay
December 30, 2004   04:52 PM PST
 
"In our world, Germany lost WWII (as well as WWI) for one reason: it was fighting on two fronts, and so lost on both."

I'd say that pretty much all of Europe lost the World Wars in *real terms*-- they all emerged much worse off after than before. Britain lost by far the most-- the world wars destroyed the British Empire, the world's largest at the time, and rendered the British a minor power. Whatever territorial losses other countries suffered, Britain tops the list-- it lost, what, 95% of the territory under its dominion?

I guess those of us from India and other places outside the West have a different take on the World Wars than you in Europe and the USA, but we have a much harder time telling apart the good guys from the bad guys. I will agree that the US held the moral high ground in WWII, but in WWI (which made WWII necessary) most of us in India, among many countries, feel that the Allies were much worse than the Central Powers. The amount of oppression or aggression committed by Germany and Austria-Hungary paled in comparison to the centuries-long brutality of the Brits alone, in India and Ireland in particular. We saw the Brits as deserving of a pummeling as much as anybody else, and I guess you could say that we were happy to see the British Empire crumble following WWII-- to us in Asia, it was as bad or worse than the Third Reich. While we don't have much respect for the Japanese considering the awful things they did in China, Korea, and Burma among other places, we consider the Brits to be far worse for what they did for hundreds of years (and still refuse to own up to, sporting our Kohinoor Diamond for themselves). We all must additionally admit, at least grudgingly, that Japan's utterly overwhelming victory over the British at Singapore in 1942 had a lot to do with the liberation of India from British rule, even if this wasn't Japan's intention.

My sense IOW is that several centuries from now, when immediate passions have cooled, historians are going to look at the world wars and agree that their most important result (other than its changes in technology) was to destroy Great Britain as a world power. Fascism and Communism were ineffectual ideologies from the get-go and likely would not have lasted the century in any case-- OTOH old-fashioned geopolitical battles for power are as old as recorded history. The Germans had far less to lose in the World Wars and, all things considered, they seem to have emerged the winners-- they have a much stronger economy and leadership position than Britain, and now are heading up the EU, something that they were basically seeking (clumsily) in WWI anyway. The Brits, OTOH, have fallen into insignificance as a world power and are left pathetically trailing behind whatever the USA does as the leader. The fact that the Brits suffered so many military defeats *after* WWII-- at Suez in 1956, in Palestine, in Indonesia, in Aden, and now (most likely) in Iraq, on top of the festering crisis in northern Ireland-- shows just how weak they have become. In contrast we in India, once the weak subjects of the British Empire, are moving to overtake Britain economically, militarily, and politically, which we'll probably do within two decades if even that.

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