A major criticism of TL191 is that the population reductions, the Confederate genocide of the Black Southern population, is implausible. Because conducting the genocide of 30% of your population, a population disproportionately represented among your menial workforce, is implausible.
It’s a criticism that I agreed with until recently, when I started doing research on the Holocaust for my own TL, I’ve come to the conclusion that this criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the text. Whilst the Population Reductions in TL191 may not be plausible they are necessary for the story being told. Simply put there is no other way for Confederate society to go in the TL191 books.
One common dimension to this criticism is that it would make more sense for the Freedomites to advocate for the return of slavery rather than genocide. The problem is that this policy is what the aristocratic conservatives want ITTL. And Jake Featherston was not an aristocrat. Featherston was the son of an impoverished slave overseer. He had no nostalgia for the system of slavery and he considered the aristocracy idiots due to the conduct of his officers during the war.
The Freedom Party are fascists not conservatives. Due to the Marxist uprisings and the conduct of black soldiers he interacts with during the Great War Featherston becomes convinced that black people’s betrayal led the Confederacy being defeated. Much as Hitler’s dislike of Jews was transformed into genocidal hate thanks to the “stab in the back” myth and conspiracy theories about Jews being behind the German Revolution, Featherston’s prejudices were hardened and revolutionised by the war. In his view preventing the loss of the next war requires the extermination of black people. This is the same kind of thinking that motivated the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Turtledove here demonstrates a ready understanding of the mindset behind many real-life genocides.
Why doesn’t Jake the Snake advocate for the return of slavery? Because Featherston’s party program is not reaching back into some mythologised past (you can see this in little details such as the way he despises George Washington for being “too Yankee”) but forwards to a revolutionary future. A future in-which there are no black people in the Confederacy.
The revolutionary nature of fascism demands that the fascist state be racially and culturally homogeneous. From as early as 1919 Hitler was calling for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. From 1923 onwards Hitler made public his intent to make Germany a state for Germans only. Even “moderate” fascist Bennito Mussolini committed genocide in Libya and complained about the immigration of Libyan labourers to Italy.
Where does this drive for a “racially pure homeland” come from in Our Timeline? As I’ve previously stated Nazism specifically emerged out of the misery and humiliation of the Great War but its ideological roots went further back. German antisemitism was rooted in the völkisch idea that the Germans were tied to the soil of Germany whilst Jews were a city-dwelling foreign force. But most Jews concentrated in the cities due to Medieval antisemitism driving them out of the countryside and preventing them from owning land. The German antisemites were complaining about a state of affairs that were of the Germans’ own making.
Freedomites in TL191 use a similar logic - blaming Black Southerners for a situation White Southerners have caused. The aristocratic planters created a system which shut black people out. Much like Jews in Germany due to the constraints placed upon them Black Southerners can never integrate into White Southern society. The system of apartheid ensures that there is a degree of separation between the two races. Interracial marriage is practically non-existent. Black Southerners live in areas separated from their white counterparts. Black people do not hold political office and most blacks cannot even vote. This is a situation infinitely more dire than the Jews faced in the Weimar Republic where they could vote, hold office, and marry gentiles. Hugo Preuss, a Jewish lawyer, wrote the Weimar constitution. It would be unimaginable for a black man to write such a document in TL191. In-effect a lot of the Freedomites’ work segregating the black population from the white population has already been done for them before they come to power in 1933.
There’s an urban legend that Turtledove’s original plan for the series was for the Central Powers to lose the Great War. Gordon McSweeney would then take power as a fascist dictator and undertake a genocide of Black Americans after invading the South. On paper the US makes a much more tempting Germany analogue than the Confederacy. Black people in the North were a tiny minority in the TTL 1920s-30s, much as the Jews were in Germany, and would serve as an easy scapegoat since they can be blamed for “dragging” the US into war with the CS for their own gain. The larger percentage of Black people in the United States’ main enemy even serves as an equivalent for the larger percentage of Jews living in Eastern Europe.
On paper. The problem with this theory is that it turns TL-191 into the story of a totalitarian United States being the real enemy of black peoples. What I suspect Turtledove’s intentions were with TL191 was to write a story about challenging conventional portrayals of the Confederacy in alternate history fiction. And you can’t really do that if the villains in the culminating trilogy is the Union.
It’s easy to forget but before TL-191 there was a strong current in alternate history fiction which presented the idea of a Confederate victory in a positive light. Hallie Marshall: A True Daughter of the South by Frank Williams, one of the earliest counterfactuals concerning a Confederate victory, features the South using black soldiers and freeing the slaves on its own without Northern pressure. Winston Churchill himself once wrote a short story which depicts a world in-which Lee wins at Gettysburg, takes New York, frees the slaves, and the victorious Confederacy ushers in a new era of world peace. MacKinlay Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War (which we know was a major influence on Turtledove) sees the Union and Confederacy reconcile soon after the civil war, eventually reunite as a nation to face off against the Soviets in Alaska, and (of course) the Confederacy frees the slaves on its own. GURPS Alternate Earths (a book of role playing settings) features a world where the Confederacy won and by the TTL 1990s has the highest standard of living in Earth. Even Turtledove’s own Guns of the South falls into this trap somewhat by portraying Lee as a wise and generous victor who ultimately pushes the Confederates to abandon slavery over moral concerns.
In writing TL191 I believe Turtledove set out with the goal of showing just how foul a Confederate victory would be for America. In TL191 the manumission of the slaves is forced on the Confederacy by pressure from its allies. Said manumission does not free the slaves. Black southerners become “resident aliens” and replaces slavery with a system of apartheid. Instead of being magnanimous, chivalrous paragons of virtue the Confederate aristocracy are presented as flawed and self-interested. The Confederate government’s expansionism plunges North America into war three separate times. The Confederacy was founded on the principle that black people should be slaves to whites. That black people were inferior to white people. That is a fundamentally evil idea upon which to base the foundation of your nation. And it is an idea which lends itself, inevitably, to genocide.
It’s a criticism that I agreed with until recently, when I started doing research on the Holocaust for my own TL, I’ve come to the conclusion that this criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the text. Whilst the Population Reductions in TL191 may not be plausible they are necessary for the story being told. Simply put there is no other way for Confederate society to go in the TL191 books.
One common dimension to this criticism is that it would make more sense for the Freedomites to advocate for the return of slavery rather than genocide. The problem is that this policy is what the aristocratic conservatives want ITTL. And Jake Featherston was not an aristocrat. Featherston was the son of an impoverished slave overseer. He had no nostalgia for the system of slavery and he considered the aristocracy idiots due to the conduct of his officers during the war.
The Freedom Party are fascists not conservatives. Due to the Marxist uprisings and the conduct of black soldiers he interacts with during the Great War Featherston becomes convinced that black people’s betrayal led the Confederacy being defeated. Much as Hitler’s dislike of Jews was transformed into genocidal hate thanks to the “stab in the back” myth and conspiracy theories about Jews being behind the German Revolution, Featherston’s prejudices were hardened and revolutionised by the war. In his view preventing the loss of the next war requires the extermination of black people. This is the same kind of thinking that motivated the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Turtledove here demonstrates a ready understanding of the mindset behind many real-life genocides.
Why doesn’t Jake the Snake advocate for the return of slavery? Because Featherston’s party program is not reaching back into some mythologised past (you can see this in little details such as the way he despises George Washington for being “too Yankee”) but forwards to a revolutionary future. A future in-which there are no black people in the Confederacy.
The revolutionary nature of fascism demands that the fascist state be racially and culturally homogeneous. From as early as 1919 Hitler was calling for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. From 1923 onwards Hitler made public his intent to make Germany a state for Germans only. Even “moderate” fascist Bennito Mussolini committed genocide in Libya and complained about the immigration of Libyan labourers to Italy.
Where does this drive for a “racially pure homeland” come from in Our Timeline? As I’ve previously stated Nazism specifically emerged out of the misery and humiliation of the Great War but its ideological roots went further back. German antisemitism was rooted in the völkisch idea that the Germans were tied to the soil of Germany whilst Jews were a city-dwelling foreign force. But most Jews concentrated in the cities due to Medieval antisemitism driving them out of the countryside and preventing them from owning land. The German antisemites were complaining about a state of affairs that were of the Germans’ own making.
Freedomites in TL191 use a similar logic - blaming Black Southerners for a situation White Southerners have caused. The aristocratic planters created a system which shut black people out. Much like Jews in Germany due to the constraints placed upon them Black Southerners can never integrate into White Southern society. The system of apartheid ensures that there is a degree of separation between the two races. Interracial marriage is practically non-existent. Black Southerners live in areas separated from their white counterparts. Black people do not hold political office and most blacks cannot even vote. This is a situation infinitely more dire than the Jews faced in the Weimar Republic where they could vote, hold office, and marry gentiles. Hugo Preuss, a Jewish lawyer, wrote the Weimar constitution. It would be unimaginable for a black man to write such a document in TL191. In-effect a lot of the Freedomites’ work segregating the black population from the white population has already been done for them before they come to power in 1933.
There’s an urban legend that Turtledove’s original plan for the series was for the Central Powers to lose the Great War. Gordon McSweeney would then take power as a fascist dictator and undertake a genocide of Black Americans after invading the South. On paper the US makes a much more tempting Germany analogue than the Confederacy. Black people in the North were a tiny minority in the TTL 1920s-30s, much as the Jews were in Germany, and would serve as an easy scapegoat since they can be blamed for “dragging” the US into war with the CS for their own gain. The larger percentage of Black people in the United States’ main enemy even serves as an equivalent for the larger percentage of Jews living in Eastern Europe.
On paper. The problem with this theory is that it turns TL-191 into the story of a totalitarian United States being the real enemy of black peoples. What I suspect Turtledove’s intentions were with TL191 was to write a story about challenging conventional portrayals of the Confederacy in alternate history fiction. And you can’t really do that if the villains in the culminating trilogy is the Union.
It’s easy to forget but before TL-191 there was a strong current in alternate history fiction which presented the idea of a Confederate victory in a positive light. Hallie Marshall: A True Daughter of the South by Frank Williams, one of the earliest counterfactuals concerning a Confederate victory, features the South using black soldiers and freeing the slaves on its own without Northern pressure. Winston Churchill himself once wrote a short story which depicts a world in-which Lee wins at Gettysburg, takes New York, frees the slaves, and the victorious Confederacy ushers in a new era of world peace. MacKinlay Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War (which we know was a major influence on Turtledove) sees the Union and Confederacy reconcile soon after the civil war, eventually reunite as a nation to face off against the Soviets in Alaska, and (of course) the Confederacy frees the slaves on its own. GURPS Alternate Earths (a book of role playing settings) features a world where the Confederacy won and by the TTL 1990s has the highest standard of living in Earth. Even Turtledove’s own Guns of the South falls into this trap somewhat by portraying Lee as a wise and generous victor who ultimately pushes the Confederates to abandon slavery over moral concerns.
In writing TL191 I believe Turtledove set out with the goal of showing just how foul a Confederate victory would be for America. In TL191 the manumission of the slaves is forced on the Confederacy by pressure from its allies. Said manumission does not free the slaves. Black southerners become “resident aliens” and replaces slavery with a system of apartheid. Instead of being magnanimous, chivalrous paragons of virtue the Confederate aristocracy are presented as flawed and self-interested. The Confederate government’s expansionism plunges North America into war three separate times. The Confederacy was founded on the principle that black people should be slaves to whites. That black people were inferior to white people. That is a fundamentally evil idea upon which to base the foundation of your nation. And it is an idea which lends itself, inevitably, to genocide.
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