History Forum / General / What If / February 2005

In a highly regarded magazine, while I was reading an article it had the
following comments. Tim Cavanaugh, in a posting on the website of Reason
magazine, offers a partial summary of other such blunders (in  WW2 while
comparing Iraq today)

In a way vaguely, and eerily, reminiscient of Adolf H's thoughts about
untermenschen (not to mention the white man's views of Native
Americans, but in reverse) Ogodei Khan believed that peasants were
inferior and pointless beings taking away good land from the nomads.

Some random thoughts, and a little spanner in the Hanoverian works.
PoD: in the afterglow of his lionization after Culloden, in about 1747,
the Duke of Cumberland - the younger son of George II - marries. (I'm
not entirely up on the matter of eighteenth-century German nobility; ...

It's safe to say that German reunification proceeded rather more slowly
and painfully than people expected in the heady days of 1990. Although
if you look at pcGDP, East Germany is far and away the richest area of
the former Soviet bloc, substantially ahead of the Czechs and a bit

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/weekinreview/27glanz.html
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/weekinreview/index.html for the drop-in
"Graphic: Dreams of an Arab Singapore"
In 1920 when Britain and France were creating the jigsaw puzzle of the

  In OTL, after WWII there were two superpowers, the United States and
the Soviet Union but this is common knowledge. The United States took
it upon itself to gurad the world against Soviet imperialism, real and
imagined. One of the main ways America did this was to support ...

what if America was discovered by a Venetian merchant fleet about the
same time as in OTL?
beeing the fact that Venice had no, or at least very small,
demographic pressure, V. would go for establishing a net of "fondachi"

would he go boni or populari?
--
There's always one fuckhead like you trying to sh.t in the apple pie. Well
you just shat in the one apple pie that knows how to sh.t back.

August 1944.
The Allies have broken out of the hedgerows of Normandy and are in the
suburbs of Paris.  In the east, the Soviet 'Bagration' offensive has
smashed Army Group Center.  Now twenty Red Army divisions have opened a

Decades of Darkness #102a: A Special Case?
Credit for this post on the history of Switzerland in the DoD timeline goes
to Good Habit, who wrote all of it apart from some very minor editorial
alterations.

he was close to doing so.....
--
There's always one fuckhead like you trying to sh.t in the apple pie. Well
you just shat in the one apple pie that knows how to sh.t back.

A long time ago (as SHWI time is measured), Sophia
posted the following:
"The year is 1579. In the woods near Kenilworth Castle
in the English Midlands Queen Elizabeth is hunting deer

Decades of Darkness #103: The Wild Hunt
"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But
notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism
seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

This is a topic that has probably been hashed around so much that it
will get the scorn it deserves but I have been reading some of Harry
Truman's diaries and letters surrounding the decision to drop the bomb.
Start with the fact that Harry had no idea what the effect would be and

WI after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in World War I the Allies had
divided territory differently?
Specically the French get Palestine and the British get Lebanon and
Syria?