re: A Turtledove Story of South African History (possible Land Use Solution added on p.4)

Well hell, check out his alien invasion series. Loved it.

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how things could go better in the future.

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They won't. Look at the rest of the continent.

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Much like the How Few Remain series envisions WW1 and WW2 fought between the USA and the CSA.

Sorry for any confusion.

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Probably not the best grist for the PoliTalk board.

Good luck.

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WHY did you give a history lesson on a political website?

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Because it is impossible to engage in a reasoned political analysis without having an accurate understanding of its historical underpinnings ... and VERY few posters on this forum seem to have any understanding at all of South African history beyond the most-simplistic, second-grade, one-paragraph basics.


EDIT: What the Hell? This thread is barely an hour old, already at three pages, and still under active discussion by multiple posters, and it has been ANCHORED and is falling progressively further down Page One despite multiple new responses?

The daily, repetitive “I Love Trump” threads?. No anchors there. Something new and unique? Tie an anchor to it.

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My major issue is that in your analogy, you leave out where the Dixievolk were much more willing to side with the Germans in WWI, not just WWII.

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Even in the few paragraphs that I included, there are at least a dozen topics that would have been interesting to expand. Yours is certainly one of them. Thanks.

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I've often argued that the Afrikaners and the American Southerners are more alike in shared common history than nearly any other groups of white people across the globe.

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A valid point.

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TLDNR: This post will summarize South African history by analogy to an alternate history of the southern United States.

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If my mother had wheels, she’d be a bike.

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How do her transportation issues help us understand the complex history of South Africa?

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You’ve never heard that saying before?

Come on propane hank.

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Either (TLDNR) or not long enough to fully develop the correlations.

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Fair enough.

I do not see how it could have been shorter and still made a decent primer on SA history, but it could EASILY have been twice as long and incorporated more detail.

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You were going to lose the bumper sticker crowd with 1/3 the volume of what you posted. Unless someone was already familiar with the history of SA (like I am not) it was pretty tortuous to ransack one's recollection of the relationships you infer.

It was probably not a valid Political Topic, although it is of interest to those of us who enjoy thoughtful exploration of historical events.

My only observation was that - for me - I was not capable of comfortably following your inferences, and that you had obviously put a lot of thought into it. But I also don't know what the appropriate forum on TigerDroppings it would better fit.

Perhaps a short intro and a LINK to a more fully developed dissertation would have been more appropriate here. I have found that it takes more effort to write something with a minimum of words than it is to fully develop you points on a subject you know a lot about.

Anyway - I appreciate your effort - and apologize for not being able (ok - for being too lazy) to competently respond.

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why you did not seem to find my OP useful in expanding knowledge of South African history.

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Because I’m not a fan of that style of hypothetical. No matter how much you try to make it an accurate representation of the situation at hand, it never really works out and you actually lose more people than you would have just trying to explain it in normal terms.

I just see it as a low brow tactic that people who can’t really articulate their point across use (whether they don’t really know how, or they’re just trying to find an accurate way to dumb down the situation for their audience, ie trying to explain calc to a 5th grader, which in this case I think it’s the latter)

Basically, the only way to really talk about the complexities of South Africa and it’s history is to use South African terms and the players used. To try to liken them to someone that your audience might understand better, while a good thought, just leaves it an ugly mud puddle of nastiness that really leaves no clear path from beginning to end.

I admire the attempt. But it just doesn’t pass muster. Its muddy and unclear. The matches don’t match up perfectly (never do in this type of hypothetical) and it leaves the reader more confused on the situation at hand than before they read it, no matter how much they understand the complexities of the situation.

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This is like the latest, worst version of Wolfenstein

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OK, that was funny.

My first draft actually did not use the quasi-Germanic terminology, but I wanted to keep it close enough to actual events and players in South Africa that anyone could follow the parallels without a scorecard.

For instance, if I were to write an alt-history novel on this premise, I would move several events by a few decades to make them fit better with actual American history ... but I wanted to keep the chronology relatable to actual events in South Africa.