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Old 07-22-2016, 07:28 AM   #2151
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A variety of changes result in Brazil being a equal rival to the USA no later than 1800. Brazil remained neutral in the French Revolution.

It's 1812, and the two states find themselves on opposing sides of the war.

Or, maybe Brazil remains neutral in 1812, but will surely oppose the USA in the upswing in US imperialism. The US civil war might be curtailed, much more successful, or just plain catastrophic.
Please remember that Brazil was an Empire until 1880. How do you know that Brazil wouldn't having imperialistic designs on the USA?

When Napoleon sold the Louisiana to the USA, the King of Spain refuted the right of Napoleon to make the sale. The viceroy in Mexico city sent troops North to capture and execute Louis and Clark. Until the Mexican American War, talk about conquering the USA was commonplace among the Mexican elites. For the first few decades of the USA's existence we had to fear imperialistic designs from others. A world with a strong Brazil could easily see Brazil's emperors backing Maximilian and the French in a bid to assert Imperial dominance Northward.
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Old 07-22-2016, 07:41 AM   #2152
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I just finished reading Churchill's Bomb. Wild book, did you know Churchill was writing about nuclear war leading to human extinction in 1925! The book is full of twists and turns, some unrealistic, some interesting.

One character that seems like an underused historical figure for alternate worlds is Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell. The man was Churchill's private boffin and courtier. Vast numbers of scientists complained that because Lindemann had Churchill's ear, and was not really up on the latest ideas in science (and in fact often hostile to proven science fact) that Britain often wasted large amounts of vital resources when they could least be spared. On the other hand, Lindemann often made important ideas and facts of science clear to Churchill when he needed the information most.

As Lindeman isn't all that well known, and his activities cast long shadows, he's a great place to work on big historical changes.
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Old 07-23-2016, 10:31 PM   #2153
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A more militarily successful Sun King could be like Aeolus, where Bourbon France becomes dominant, but then slowly decays. Or like Shikaku-Mon, where Bourbon France becomes dominant, but then is beaten soundly by an alliance of everybody else.


Brazil could become independent during the Napoleonic Wars, when the royal family of Portugal fled there (with much British assistance). Maybe the ship with the Portuguese royals sinks in the Atlantic, and Brazil declares itself independent. This would effect not just power politics in the Americas, but also Europe, as it would be harder for Britain in the Penisular War with France over Spain if it didn't have a Portuguese royal family in Brazil as an ally.

One way to get Brazil to rival with the USA would be to give Brazil a Caribbean coast. During the Napoleonic Wars, Brazilian forces occupied French Guiana, but that is still pretty distant. Maybe an independent Brazil also takes Dutch Guyana (while the colonial power is occupied by France), even British Guyana.

Or Brazil's independence inspires an earlier revolt of Spanish America. Most of Spain was occupied by Napoleon at the time. Instead of Simon Bolivar as the leader of the Spanish American independence movement, its Brazilian-led. So then the Yankees get involved because they see a Brazilian-dominated Latin America as a threat. First objective: conquer Florida. Second objective: conquer Cuba.
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Old 07-24-2016, 12:21 AM   #2154
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Jumping in on this bit, after the fact.

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The Kennedy's were bent on disrupting and destroying organized crime. And I think the Marilyn Monroe angle is part of it too - she was the mistress of crime boss and Kennedy stole her (I guess the romantic conspiracy theorists like that version).
The key points to the "Killed by the Mafia" storyline with JFK are based on prior generations. Joe Kennedy was, according to Sam Bronfman (a Canadian millionaire who was an admitted bootlegger on the Canadian side of the border), heavily invested in bootlegging, which would have required him to be 'mobbed up'. Joe's father-in-law was Honey Fitz (John F Fitzgerald) a former mayor of Boston, and an Irish-Catholic political "fixer" in the Democratic Party. Which of course means that he was mobbed-up too (tongue firmly in cheek). So, the theory goes, while the Kennedys' crusade on crime looks like reformers cleaning up America to the public, to the 'baptized' it looks a lot like one family taking out all the competition. So they had to retaliate, or they would all be out of the Game.

So, if you're having the "Mafia-killed-Kennedy" as a plotline, you really need to keep "Kennedy-was-mobbed-up" as well, for it to hold together with any kind of logical coherency. Sure, the risks were high; but the stakes were enormous. If the Kennedys controlled the DoJ and the Mafia, well, you can only imagine.
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Old 07-24-2016, 12:46 AM   #2155
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Could the Reich have conceivably broken in the late thirties? Suppose that a rail accident early in the rise of the party kills some middle-ranking Nazis who otherwise would have been important in cementing the party's power. Around 1936, the increasingly coercive governance is marginally less skillful, and the Nazis slowly lose control of the state. Starting with local protests (with harsh crackdowns encouraging further protests), how fast can democracy return to Germany?

What does a democratic Germany (one that emerges months before the war would have started at the earliest,) do to the timeline? Presumably it would only delay the war...
No, the best chance for a democratic Germany is if Brüning cedes the Chancelorship to Otto Wels in 1930. Pretty much every political step taken after that point is going one more step closer to a dictatorship--perhaps not a Nazi one, perhaps not even a fascist one; but certainly a dictatorship of some kind.
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Old 07-24-2016, 03:48 AM   #2156
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No, the best chance for a democratic Germany is if Brüning cedes the Chancelorship to Otto Wels in 1930. Pretty much every political step taken after that point is going one more step closer to a dictatorship--perhaps not a Nazi one, perhaps not even a fascist one; but certainly a dictatorship of some kind.
Quite possibly a short-lived one, though. A TL in which Germany collapses into civil war in the 1930s could be interesting (in the Chinese sense), especially if their neighbors decide to intervene.
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Old 07-25-2016, 11:49 AM   #2157
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There aren't a whole lot of Soviet survival worlds (other than ones which were written before the '90s as cold political fact), and on reflection it is, of course, hard to imagine what could have prevented the breakup.

Eliminating Lysenkoism might help (as, I think, one of the books suggests), as does my setting where Lysenkoism happens to be correct (leading to, in the '90s, a generation of soviet child supersoldiers). The real question is what kind of USSR you want to have.

I personally admire Soviet space accomplishments, so I might tend to, for instance, have an asteroid get semi-captured by Earth in 1963. The metalic asteroid is small by cosmic standards -- only a few dozen tons -- but it is a rich nickel-iron-platinum mix.

This temporary second moon would be a natural destination. Let the soviets get there first, and they'll bring back lumps of osmium and platinum, making moon rocks look like, well, rocks.

Actually bringing back an economically significant portion of metal would require advanced spaceflight, but the Apollo missions returned 800 pounds of rock, and recovery from the asteroid wouldn't need to worry about takeoff.

Even if they brought back a similar amount of material, it would only be a few million dollars worth of commodity. Perhaps the soviets stabilize the orbit and use the rock to stabilize their currency in an abstract way -- "We can print 30 trillion rubles because we HAVE 30 trillion rubles." Maybe they simply bring back what they can and claim they have trillions of dollars of rare metals.

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Old 07-25-2016, 03:25 PM   #2158
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There aren't a whole lot of Soviet survival worlds (other than ones which were written before the '90s as cold political fact), and on reflection it is, of course, hard to imagine what could have prevented the breakup.
No it isn't. All it really would have taken is replacing Gorbachev with someone with the qualities of a Stalin or a Napoleon. The economic problems were inevitable. The response was not.
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Old 07-25-2016, 04:43 PM   #2159
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Alternatively, have the Soviet Union pursue reform earlier, more slowly, and without the political reforms that Gorbachev brought in to weaken the hardliners.
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Old 07-25-2016, 10:39 PM   #2160
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No it isn't. All it really would have taken is replacing Gorbachev with someone with the qualities of a Stalin or a Napoleon. The economic problems were inevitable. The response was not.
Note too that the Communist Party continues to govern the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, neither of which shows strong signs of being on the edge of collapse, and indeed look like they are doing fairly well. Sure their "communism" might not resemble Marx's vision very closely, but nothing says the Soviet Union has to stick any closer to it.
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