Re: New Reality Seeds
 

The Weimar Republic could be very progressive, the German Empire, taking a lesson from Bismarck, could steal the Left's thunder by offering pragmatic reforms. Still, there was strong romantic anti-modernism in German society cultivated by the elites as a means of holding control. So, if the old elites aren't weakened somehow, why would they reject colonialism, an ideal which supported elite values and agendas.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Because it weakens the enemy? It's not like the Soviets were all that anti-imperial in general (Russia still has a significant empire after all), but they played the role well on the world stage for decades anyway.

Well it *appears* to weaken the enemy anyway. There's some doubt about how much benefit an empire really provides compared even to investment at home, never mind neo-colonialism where you let the locals take the heat of providing government and just collect the monetary profits.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I think that the main benefit is that it denies old markets to your enemies and opens new markets to you. For example, the main utility of India to the UK was that the UK could force India to purchase their manufactured goods by forbidding the sell of non-UK manufactured goods in India. Having an independent India would allow the German Empire a share of the Indian market, which would have been better than their nonexistent share when India was under UK control.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Try this one...

This Q6 low manna parallel is called Lincoln-7 because it diverges with a major change in Abraham Lincoln's life. The change is that a former slave, Ms. Henrietta Randolph-Lee, discovered the plot to kill Lincoln on April 7th, 1865. After failing to convince anyone of the threat, Henrietta, who had worked as a fieldhand and was far stronger than she looked, waylaid Booth on the 14th and beat him to death with a hammer.

Henrietta was arrested, but once the plot to kill Lincoln got uncovered she became a hero, and, unlike other parallels, she found her lost family members and lived to a ripe old age. And with Lincoln running Reconstruction firmer and more radical measures were taken, while the government took time to show respect to the losers. The Planter elites, seen by many as the cause of the war (and who were largely pardoned and given their land back by Andrew Johnson) lost most of their lands as punishment for their crimes. Following certain ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln distributed the lands of the planter elites among ex-slaves and the poor of any race (it turned out much like the land reforms America promoted after WWII that were organized by Wolf Ladejinsky). Many sneered at this as Forty Acres and a Mule, although the lots were substancially larger.

These measures meant poor Whites needed to support the rights of Black folks in order to hold their own lands. Thus the Lost Cause had few takers outside of the remnants of the Planter Elites. American race relations skipped ahead about 165 years in the next 45 years. With racism against Black Folks kicked to the curb, racism against other groups (Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc) collapsed as well. Women's rights progressed rapidly too. Class issues were addressed as well. Even the limited tolerance is shown LBGTQ people became greater rather than facing a series of brutal backlashes between 1890 and 1940. By 1912 America was reelecting its first African American President.

1913 is the local year. TR's handpicked successor, Emanuel Jackson is in his second term and has gotten through most of the Progressive reforms that in Homeline history were pushed through in the Wilson administration and a good deal more of the Left-wing of the Progressive agenda as well. America is doing fine, Europe has serious issues though.

Basically, the colonized peoples of the world and the poor of Europe are looking at America and saying, "Why not us?" Those that hold and profit from the colonial empires are appalled. Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria, have come to the conclusion that America must be made to behave with more decorum and circumspection.

This is an Alternate WWI, or not. Maybe your PCs can prevent the war. Centrum likes how egalitarian this USA is, but if this America continues to thrive the British Empire will probably fall. With the combined might of the British, French, and German Navies, the European powers can ship vast armies to Canada and invade America from the North. But this is a far more United America and this Canada are far too honorable to be a mere assassin under imperial orders.

Both Homeline and the Cabal (for very different reasons) wants to prevent a war between Europe and America.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I think that Centrum would be leaning towards Lincoln-7's United States. They don't have a mystical attraction to the British Empire; they find it easier to work with in part because it speaks English. With the correct steering, the United States could absorb Canada either before or during the Great War.

The Europeans would also need to be watching each other, not just preparing to fight the United States. And the United States would probably be gearing up to defend itself...

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

You are insightful. But let's agree to disagree. This Europe wants to keep the lid on and in our history they willing killed to do so.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Could there have been a negotiated peace to end The Great War, where Czarist Russia and maybe the Ottoman Empire falls, but not Imperial Germany (and maybe Austro-Hungary)? It took until 1917 for the Romanovs to fall - by that point, it seems like The War To End All Wars was going to the bitter end.

The concept of this timeline seems to be more pragmatic/less dogmatic/not as bad leadership, the kind who could accept just some territory swaps and the like (what would happen to Alsace-Lorraine?). But it wasn't just the will of some leaders that made WWI, but everything from the alliances to rising nationalism.

Maybe better leaders means that The Great War doesn't happen (like if the Archduke isn't killed). But that's just putting off the inevitable.

Maybe a different war ensues somehow - France does better, but Russia does worse (involve Rasputin). Germany calls off the war early to feast on the collapsed Czarist Empire.

If there isn't a whole defeat of Imperial Germany, its colonies would likely be restored - far too minor to make a fuss over between family. Japan & South Africa might demand to keep their conquests, but no one in the Colonial Office cared about Tanganyika.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

The problem there is that the efforts to get one historically never came close. Germany proposed negotiations in 1916, and the allies treated it as a ruse. Both Wilson and the Pope tried to mediate, and as far as I can tell couldn't even get both sides to set forth their demands, let alone open negotiations on them. The war actually ended with a series of negotiated settlements, but the governments of Russia, Germany, and Austria Hungary had already fallen before they signed. The Ottomans took two years of further civil war to formally sign something, and promptly lost the civil war anyway. The Russians shortly repudiated their treaty after Germany lost in the West, and they probably always would have, it gave away too much to be tolerable as anything more than a ploy to gain some breathing room.

The first new German government *also* immediately resigned rather than sign on to Versailles, it and it provoked so much unhappiness in the Allies that it arguably contributed to the changes in government in Italy and Japan, never did pass the US Senate (partly out of failure to address the problem of Ireland, the de facto civil war in the UK at the time), denouncing it as too harsh became a customary part of British politics for two decades, and it came pretty close to causing a right wing uprising in France over the failure to annex the Rhineland (i.e. for not being harsh enough). The minimum you were going to need to satisfy the populace of the Allies simply wasn't going to be tolerable to any of the Central Powers, and there were ongoing or looming civil wars in so many of the parties there wasn't a lot of room to maneuver.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Centrum will like the equality a lot. The sticking point for Centrum is the democracy. You can pretend the British Empire isn't democratic because nominally the monarch is in charge.

I predict that Centrum will go with the "there must be Secret Masters who really control the elections" belief system. After all, real democracy can't work. So their efforts will concentrate on finding the Secret Masters of the USA and taking them over.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Nixon-2: The earliest identifiable point of divergence for Nixon-2 is the murder of W. Mark Fell immediately after his first meeting with Woodward and Bernstein. This along with several other odd events seems to have enabled Richard Nixon to successfully serve out his second term in office (although Spiro Agnew still ends being removed and replaced with Gerald Ford). South Vietnam still exists with American support and has become another "Asian Tiger".

However as the years go by more and more famous people are people who never made a mark in Homeline's history. This low historical inertia made Nixon-2 particularly attractive to Homeline business interests since Nixon 2 is filled with creative media from a plethora of writers and filmmakers who never got a break in most of the near-parallels Homeline has discovered. However in the year 2001 Nixon-2 experienced a massive and highly improbable terrorist attack with simultaneous attacks from both Islamic attacks and a homegrown conspiracy which includes the assassination of President Sutherland that kills over a hundred thousand Americans. Worse, the next year the world experiences a massive pandemic that is widely believed to be a follow-up terrorist attack.

An attempt by a Homeworld firm to do well by doing good backfired massively when their attempt to sell an offworld treatment for the disease is interpreted as the conspiracy behind the pandemic showing itself. Their rapid withdrawl to avoid exposure has only fed the paranoia.