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Confederate: bad idea or the WORST idea?


Kalbear

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59 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Man, I'm really in the minority over actually enjoying AFFC and ADWD aren't I?   General issues I had with them went away on rereads, and in particular after listening to the audiobooks...

I totally agree with you!

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3 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

I think this is right. It probably goes down something like:

It will turn out that the Union Army really, really sucks at field security. During the night Lee will recruit 20 good men to infiltrate the Union Camp.

General Meade will wake up in the morning and will find out that half his camp has been burned downed and that Colonel Chamberlain, along with the entire 20th Maine Infantry, has been murdered in their sleep.

With half his provisions and supplies destroyed and unable to hold his left flank, Meade will decide to launch a desperate frontal attack, resulting in the encirclement and utter destruction of the Union Army.

General Meade will be severely wounded and while resting against a tree, trying to catch his breath, Judge Dredd will show up, and say, “I am the law!” and then promptly execute Meade. 

And that will be that, Confederacy wins.
 

You had me until the Colonel Chamberlain/20th Maine part. Far more likely Chamberlain and his men were brainwashed by the Confederates and destroyed the whole union army singlehandedly. 

1 hour ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Man, I'm really in the minority over actually enjoying AFFC and ADWD aren't I?   General issues I had with them went away on rereads, and in particular after listening to the audiobooks...

The audiobooks OK? I just bought them as gift for someone. 

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3 hours ago, ljkeane said:

That was pretty much the Confederate plan for actually winning wasn't it? The obvious thing to do alternative history wise would be to have the Trent Affair go a bit more wrong. If the Americans had actually sank the Trent or something like that it might have provoked war.

The popular view in Europe in 1861 was that the breakup of the USA was a done deal and that the Union would fail to reconquer the South. So although Britain and France may have liked the idea of a weakened USA they didn't think they had to do anything to bring it about. Of course, if the US had refused to hand over the diplomats I guess that could have led to war anyway. 

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9 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

You had me until the Colonel Chamberlain/20th Maine part. Far more likely Chamberlain and his men were brainwashed by the Confederates and destroyed the whole union army singlehandedly. 

Maybe Chamberlain gets talked into marrying Jefferson Davis as a way of destroying the Confederacy from the inside and then you know, that plan doesn't quite pan out.

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12 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

You had me until the Colonel Chamberlain/20th Maine part. Far more likely Chamberlain and his men were brainwashed by the Confederates and destroyed the whole union army singlehandedly. 

The audiobooks OK? I just bought them as gift for someone. 

I was slow to get into them, being used to the Harry Potter books and Jim Dale's wonderful voice, but really grew to appreciate them, especially since my eyes glazed over while reading the Dany chapters...

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5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I totally agree with you!

And I. :)

 

I definitely think the South _could_ have won the Civil War and maintained its independence in the short term, if you stack the dack enough in the South's favor. Turtledove obviusly worked that out pretty well, and I think the result therein is plausible. It's everything else, this idea of the Confederate States of America maintaining sovereignty for a century and a half, that seems insurmountable... but if they get some very clever historians to provide advice, maybe they can work it out.

 

Or, you know, maybe they don't bother. The world of The Handmaid's Tale TV series makes nearly zero sense, because they wanted to show the before and the after as being very close together rather than a long-term change. The United States will not become a Christian fundamentalist dystopia inside of just a few years, it's a matter of decades. And yet if one is willing to suspend disbelief, the series is an excellent and thought-provoking drama. So perhaps Confederate can get away with not going too far into detail, and just saying, "Look, here's the premise, the important part is what's happening now."

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Another option is they go all-in on the science fiction angle, and the South wins because of time traveling confederate sympthaizers who have modern guns.

I know I've read at least one book that had that premise as well.

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2 minutes ago, Fez said:

Another option is they go all-in on the science fiction angle, and the South wins because of time traveling confederate sympthaizers who have modern guns.

I know I've read at least one book that had that premise as well.

That's another Turtledove series.

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28 minutes ago, Ran said:

Or, you know, maybe they don't bother. The world of The Handmaid's Tale TV series makes nearly zero sense, because they wanted to show the before and the after as being very close together rather than a long-term change. The United States will not become a Christian fundamentalist dystopia inside of just a few years, it's a matter of decades. And yet if one is willing to suspend disbelief, the series is an excellent and thought-provoking drama. So perhaps Confederate can get away with not going too far into detail, and just saying, "Look, here's the premise, the important part is what's happening now."

I wouldn't go that far. I think you could make the argument that we're one really catastrophic terrorist event away from that potentiality. Think a dirty bomb being set off in NYC or really any major population center in the U.S. With this POTUS we've got now, it wouldn't take much to start down that road.

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22 hours ago, Fez said:

Maybe in this alternate timeline, the Confederacy succeeded in getting Great Britain and France to declare war on the Union; possibly after Lee wins at Gettysburg. Which also allows a nice parallel to the Revolutionary War.

And the Confederacy did in fact try to get Europe to attack and, thought they would, because of the need for cotton. They didn't realize that Egyptian and Indian cotton production had already ramped up to the point where Confederate cotton was unnecessary, but the show could gloss over that part.

Well, and I also think that it is very unlikely that England would have intervened, at the end of the day, given the politics and policies of the time, particularly the dependence on grain imported from the US.  Maybe if Lee had won at Antietam.  Maybe. But McLellan fought that battle about as poorly as one could imagine, without his whole strength and Lee still had to withdraw.

 Also, Werthead's point is the right one.  The Union and Lincoln didn't necessarily want to burn it all to the ground at the beginning.  Everything was much more fluid at the beginning.  Finally, I don't think that the guerilla war, wear out the antagonist strategy that worked in the Revolutionary war would have worked.  There weren't the same distance issues.  There weren't the same geopolitical forces, unless there is an invasion from Canada.  Also, that kind of warfare really wasn't Lee's strength.  

19 hours ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

I think it is Lee having a successful campaign in 1862 would be more probable in getting U.K and/or France to recognize the Confederacy.  

The '63 campaign I find more difficult for that goal. The South was really hurting in the West. Outside wiping out the Army of the Potomac, Gettysburg still would of been offsetted with Vicksburg fall and the North having absolute control of the Mississippi River.

I would really like to see Turtledove's Guns of The South be done though it is more of a one-off series. 

Yeah - I think if he had somehow pulled off Antietam, but that would have been really hard for him.

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1 hour ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

I wouldn't go that far. I think you could make the argument that we're one really catastrophic terrorist event away from that potentiality. Think a dirty bomb being set off in NYC or really any major population center in the U.S. With this POTUS we've got now, it wouldn't take much to start down that road.

There's no way that a country that is 50%+ weakly or not at all affiliated with religion (over 20% are unaffiliated with any religion in the U.S., and you can bet that a significant portion of the 47% of people who claim in a Pew poll that they attend church once a week are fudging the truth and/or do so out of habit/social reasons rather than deep religious conviction, and even fewer are what we would consider fundamentalists) would suddenly be swept into theocracy with the above parameters. Martial law fueled by paranoia, yes, sure. But a theocracy leveraging off of that just can't happen, realistically, in the scenario presented on the TV show. They throw in the low birth rate and so on to try and justify it, but this is something that would take decades to sort out. In this regards, I think Children of Men is a more realistic depiction of the real chaos that would happen if birth rates spiraled down precipitously.

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21 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Fuck them.  This is the last straw.  They don't even have the decency to film it in Georgia or Louisiana or some southern state where there is an established film industry and black workers could benefit.  FUCK THEM.  

It was a joke. 

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I did not watch The Handmaid's Tale but in general a theocracy doesn't have to really regulate the private lives of their citizens in every detail. They just have to create the fear of repercussions from the state and then people fall in line as they are right now in Turkey and did in Iran after the revolution in 1979. There might be regions in the US where people live decent secular lives but those seem to be small islands of modernity in what is essentially a backwater country. If you allow them to keep their guns many of the people there wouldn't have all that much problems forcing their women to cover their hair and other dangerous body parts.

Right now the American (right-wing) establishment just pays lip service to the Christian nation thing. But it shouldn't be that hard to establish a theocracy there a few decades down the road, especially if the right people continue to control the states and education. Israel is also pretty likely to go down the theocratic route if they don't decide to do something about those ultra-orthodox Jews who are not unlikely to increase their percentage in the population in the years to come.

But in general, I don't really see what the point of all that is. What little we know about this idea right now makes it a very bad premise - of course on the basis of what we know. That doesn't mean that somebody couldn't create convincing or even great characters acting within that framework or tell compelling stories in the setting.

It is just that the setting doesn't come off as a great idea.

And as to the slavery issue - the realism part there is that only the Confederacy continuing to practice slavery after they successfully seceded seems to be the usual part of American productions focusing too much on American affairs. The South would be the only developed country (or association of states) in the world to continue to practice slavery. That should put them at odds eventually with not just the North - again and again - but also the entire world.

Unless they come up with the ridiculous idea that Mexico, Canada, and various European powers decided to follow the lead of the Confederacy and reintroduced slavery because it was a good idea, or something of that sort, it is very unlikely that such a thing would have continued all that long. One could perhaps speculate that World War I and II would have gone differently with America split up but Hitler had no intention of enslaving subhuman races. They were to be exterminated. There is little common ground here. The European nations didn't exactly abduct thousands of people from Africa to work on their plantations, nor do they have any reason to do so.

And basically America would either be a non-factor or at least much less important on the global scale if the Union and the Confederacy remained split for decades, continuing their hostilities throughout this period. That is most likely not a fact an American audience would like to hear (or see on screen), which would be the reason why the whole setting is not really thought through nor very likely to focus all that much on the global implications of this thing.

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1 hour ago, Ran said:

There's no way that a country that is 50%+ weakly or not at all affiliated with religion (over 20% are unaffiliated with any religion in the U.S., and you can bet that a significant portion of the 47% of people who claim in a Pew poll that they attend church once a week are fudging the truth and/or do so out of habit/social reasons rather than deep religious conviction, and even fewer are what we would consider fundamentalists) would suddenly be swept into theocracy with the above parameters. Martial law fueled by paranoia, yes, sure. But a theocracy leveraging off of that just can't happen, realistically, in the scenario presented on the TV show. They throw in the low birth rate and so on to try and justify it, but this is something that would take decades to sort out. In this regards, I think Children of Men is a more realistic depiction of the real chaos that would happen if birth rates spiraled down precipitously.

Yeah, I agree that whatever sort of change this sort of event might spark wouldn't necessarily look like A Handmaid's Tale, but that is one of a number of authoritarian possibilities. Let's say someone like Pence ends up in the big chair before during or after such an event. It would likely look the way the authoritarian who takes the reins wants it to look. 

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There's a huge leap from "Terrorists did something awful" to "Enslave women, murder Catholics, gays, etc., etc." in this country. I can't rule it out as something that could happen, but not in the span of a single presidency. It's a matter of decades. People need to be driven toward religious fundamentalism in enormous numbers, and that's not something that happens at the flick of a switch.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Fez said:

Another option is they go all-in on the science fiction angle, and the South wins because of time traveling confederate sympthaizers who have modern guns.

I know I've read at least one book that had that premise as well.

 

4 hours ago, Ran said:

That's another Turtledove series.

Guns of the South.  AK-47s.  

A stand alone story though.

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On 7/22/2017 at 3:20 PM, Ran said:

Or, you know, maybe they don't bother. The world of The Handmaid's Tale TV series makes nearly zero sense, because they wanted to show the before and the after as being very close together rather than a long-term change. The United States will not become a Christian fundamentalist dystopia inside of just a few years, it's a matter of decades. And yet if one is willing to suspend disbelief, the series is an excellent and thought-provoking drama. So perhaps Confederate can get away with not going too far into detail, and just saying, "Look, here's the premise, the important part is what's happening now."

The original book was written in the 80s and the Christian theocracy threat may have felt more real then wth Reagan as president and groups like the Moral Majority rising in influence (though now there's Pence as VP). But even in the series I understood it that the Sons of Jacob staged a terrorist attack and blamed it on Islamic terrorism and used that to stage a coup. From there they instituted a totalitarian society where they controlled people enough to force their religious behaviors on everyone. Presumably they must have had some military support as well. It's also indicated that there is still active fighting in many places, so it seems like they might have much more control over New England than other parts of the US. I agree it doesn't make total sense and some of it is a stretch, but I think it makes more sense than you give it credit for. 

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On 7/22/2017 at 2:08 PM, Ran said:

There's no way that a country that is 50%+ weakly or not at all affiliated with religion (over 20% are unaffiliated with any religion in the U.S., and you can bet that a significant portion of the 47% of people who claim in a Pew poll that they attend church once a week are fudging the truth and/or do so out of habit/social reasons rather than deep religious conviction, and even fewer are what we would consider fundamentalists) would suddenly be swept into theocracy with the above parameters. Martial law fueled by paranoia, yes, sure. But a theocracy leveraging off of that just can't happen, realistically, in the scenario presented on the TV show. They throw in the low birth rate and so on to try and justify it, but this is something that would take decades to sort out. In this regards, I think Children of Men is a more realistic depiction of the real chaos that would happen if birth rates spiraled down precipitously.

 I wish I could buy into this, as I am atheistic, but I think the balance is still tipped towards Christianity in this country. You could not consider a serious run at any upper political office in this country as a public non-believer.

 I think the problem here with much of your assessment is the assumption that otherwise logical and free thinking folks will not be swept into theocracy. That sweeping might not be voluntary, but in A Handmaids Tale sort of scenario you have a militant wing that is forcing that issue behind the barrel of a gun. 

 I agree that whatever form that authoritarian government might take might not necessarily be theocratic, but it's in the cards. 

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On 7/20/2017 at 9:11 PM, Lord Varys said:

If we take this ridiculous setting at face value - of the Confederacy successfully seceding - then they would have quickly ruined themselves economically simply because they continued to practice slavery and failed to develop a proper modern 19-20th century economics/industrialist society. Slaver societies are not exactly progressive. They don't have to be. The ruling class owns a lot of the workforce as their property and can live off the work with much more impunity than it can in non-slaver societies.

I think you’ve brought up some interesting points about how a modern Confederacy would have ever become a modern industrialized power after the Civil War. I think there were would have been some major headwinds there.

1. Being relatively rich in labor and in land as compared to capital, the South wouldn’t have any sort of comparative advantage in industrial goods. In order to grow such an industrial base, the South would have seemingly had to impose tariffs of some sort. From what I recall the Confederate constitution banned tariffs. And even if it hadn’t, it is hard to imagine the planter class not bitterly resisting said tariffs and prevailing on that issue. 

2. The Confederate constitution severely limited the ability of the centralized government to make internal improvements. Arguably this reflected the the powerful plantation’s class preference for public goods, which wasn’t much. I think that would be southern industrialist would likely have a higher preference publicly provided goods, even if for their own selfish reasons. In my mind, an obvious public good  that industrialist might have favored, that the plantation class, would be some kind of, even if rudimentary, system of public education. For a planter, such a system would have likely been looked as a drain upon their profits. An industrialist might have looked at matters somewhat differently, seeing an education system boosting his profits, while the taxes to pay for it, having a bit of a consumption smoothing effect. Also, it would seem to me, that an industrialist class would favor a higher degree of of internal improvements in order to reduce the transportation cost of selling their wares within the country, as opposed to planters who might, at best, have only wanted those improvements that made moving their goods to the nearest port easier.

3. Realistically, I think  southern industrialist and the planter class having a bit of conflict over matters. I’d expect generally for the planter class to have one that battle. It would certainly have been interesting to see how something like that would have played out. Maybe the power of the planter class would have eventually been broken, but probably not until somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century. And by that time, the Southern states would have been way behind the power curve.

The upshot of all this is that I think it unlikely that the Confederacy would have developed into some kind of modern industrial power. I think the plantation class would have maintained it’s political stranglehold on the South and it would, as a result, have become a fairly backward nation.
 

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I'm not American, so please forgive my ignorance, but it is not the case that in OTL the south was much poorer than the north until the middle of the Twentieth-Century anyway? So win or lose the south is going to be behind the north in terms of industry and per capita income. And lots of poorer countries have started to catch up with the developed western nations, in certain respects, over the last thirty years or more, so the south could do the same. 

Actually, is it not possible that the south could have looked similar in terms of wealth sixty years or so after a successful secession, while the north could look worse? The north favoured high tariffs to protect its industries against European competition while the south wanted low tariffs to make its exports of raw materials and imports of manufactures more economic. So freer trade between the south and Europe (especially the UK) might have been the result of a confederate victory, while the union would suffer because the US single market would not be as large as it is in OTL. 

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