Line #5 Literature/FightAndBeRight


1	Fight and be Right is a timeline/story written by [=EdT=], the writer of Literature/AGreaterBritain which can be found on Website/AlternateHistoryDotCom.
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3	The focus of the story is the political career of Churchill. [[UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill No, not that one]]. Instead, it focuses on his father - Lord Randolph Churchill.
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5	[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Randolph_Churchill Lord Randolph Churchill]] was the father of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill Winston Churchill]] and was a major political figure in his own right during the late 19th Century, serving as Secretary of State for India, Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer during the mid 1880's. In real history Randolph Churchill died in 1895 at the age of just 45, reputedly from syphilis but more recent theories suggest the cause of death was a brain tumour. In his lifetime he was often tipped to one day be Prime Minister, but made too many enemies and ultimately misjudged the situation when he threatened to resign, only to have the resignation accepted. This timeline explores what might have happened if Randolph and his "Tory Democracy" ideas had indeed risen to the top. The results...[[{{Understatement}} might not be what you expect]].
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7	The piece's title is taken from a speech Lord Randolph made in opposition to Irish Home Rule in which he said, "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right.", which was popularised as Fight and be Right.
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9	It can be read [[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=94562 here]] and downloaded [[http://edthomasten.deviantart.com/art/Fight-and-Be-Right-176385571 here]]. A travelogue-with-interviews style companion book, set in this timeline's early 1940s, can also be downloaded [[http://orig06.deviantart.net/d6ab/f/2011/043/2/8/world_of_fight_and_be_right_by_edthomasten-d39cpxf.pdf here]]. Further overviews of the timeline can be found [[http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php/timelines/fight_and_be_right here]].
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11	----
12	!!Contains examples of:
13	* AllohistoricalAllusion: Many of them, including a number of alternate history 'false friends' (when a real life term is used to mean something different) - for example, the term "Robot" is used to describe a member of a Russian hybrid religious-scientific monastic order.
14	%%* AssholeVictim: King Leopold of Belgium certainly qualifies.
15	%%* BombThrowingAnarchists: Lechini[[note]]the murderer of Empress Elizabeth of Austria[[/note]] decides to murder a more deserving victim, [[spoiler: King Leopold of Belgium]]
16	%%* TheBarnum: Horatio Bottomley (who was both an MP and an inveterate fraudster in our timeline) eventually becomes Prime Minister and is implied to be this.
17	* ChinaTakesOverTheWorld: Thanks to a less disastrous late 19th century (smaller defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, no Boxer uprising, no successful backlash against reforms), China avoids the bad first half of the 20th century. [[spoiler:At the time of the epilogue, it is one of the world's great powers.]]
18	%%* DifferentWorldDifferentMovies: Including some different Creator/GilbertAndSullivan work and [[CrackPairing a novel co-written by]] Creator/PGWodehouse and Creator/HPLovecraft.
19	* DistantFinale: The main body of the TL concludes before the end of the nineteenth century, but the epilogue is set first in 1934 and then in 1940...
20	* DistantPrologue: And the prologue is set in 1936.
21	* DownerBeginning: The prologue shows a meeting of the British cabinet during the alternate Great War and Britain is losing.
22	%%* TheEndingChangesEverything: And how!
23	* FictionalPoliticalParty: Randolph succeeds in uniting the more radical wings of both the Conservative and Liberal Parties to form the Unionist Party. The more old-school 'whiggish' parts of the two parties eventually also team up to form the opposition Liberal-Conservative Party.
24	* FootnoteFever: As usual in an [=EdT=] work, there are plenty of footnotes - most of them informing the reader that what sounds like a ridiculously unlikely turn of events is something [[RealityIsUnrealistic that actually happened in real life]].
25	* ForWantOfANail: The PointOfDivergence is simply that a maid doesn't find a letter in a desk that exposed Randolph to a scandal which delayed his political ascendancy in our timeline.
26	%%* GenericanEmpire: TheFederation of Workers' Republics which includes [[spoiler:most of the former British Empire.]]
27	%%* HegemonicEmpire: The German Empire and its Zollverein.
28	* InNameOnly: Churchill's Tory Democracy is this regarding Toryism. It includes a wide range of progressive reforms similar to those made by Bismark in Germany along with a labour board, state controlled trade unions, fair trade, granting women the right to vote and to stand for elections, government-sponsored vacations, healthcare reform and more.
29	* TheOrder: Rabota Boga, translated as "Work of God" is a Russian hybrid religious-scientific monastic order led by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Florensky Pavel Florensky]] which is responsible for much of Imperial Russia's industrialization.
30	* PeaceConference: The Washington Conference, which ends the War of the Dual Alliance, the last major war of the 19th century.
31	* ProtoSuperhero: Spring-heeled Jack, originally an urban legend adapted into Victorian era penny dreadfuls, eventually develops into an early 20th century British superhero. Funnily enough, after the overthrow of the British monarchy by the British syndicalists, both the new syndicalist government and the British loyalists in exile keep publishing comic books with their own takes on the character.
32	* PuttingOnTheReich: Randolph Churchill's period in government includes the Boy Scouts taking on a bigger role and using a swastika as their symbol ([[RealityIsUnrealistic as they did in real life at this point, but it didn't catch on]]) for a 'Hitler Youth' vibe, a Nazi-like focus on public fitness and public violence against Jews after they are tied to the Jack the Ripper case. However, this is all fairly superficial and doesn't say the government is at all Nazi-like. [[spoiler:Its successors, on the other hand...]]
33	* TheRemnant: The Kingdom of Portugal is reduced to [[spoiler:Angola after losing the Portuguese civil war, when continental Portugal becomes a republic.]]
34	%%* TheRepublic: France
35	%%* TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized: The Syndicalist revolution that overthrows the government of [[spoiler:Britain]].
36	* RichardNixonTheUsedCarSalesman: Used both straight and with variations. One particular area of focus is pondering what might have happened to people who were immigrants to America in our timeline, but not in this one, or the other way around. For example, Al Capone becomes President of France, "Benny Moss" (Benito Mussolini) is an American journalist, and Eamon de Valera remains in New York where he was born and eventually becomes Vice-President of the United States. Hitler and Stalin are both members of the same criminal gang.
37	* ShoutOut:
38	** The maps of London [[spoiler:under Syndicalism have several references to]] ''[[spoiler:Literature/NineteenEightyFour]]''. Indeed, in some ways the 'point' of the timeline is to show how such a situation could plausibly have been reached.
39	** The early British comic book superhero Spring-heeled Jack, a.k.a The Cowled Cavalier (originally) or The Cowled Colleague [[spoiler:(after the syndicalist takeover)]], is an obvious tongue-in-cheek homage to Batman.
40	%%* ShownTheirWork: Plenty of it, especially in the epilogue articles of "Benny Moss" which cover world affairs.
41	* TeamSwitzerland: [[spoiler:France]] becomes this after losing the War of the Dual Alliance.
42	* UnusualEuphemism: Hansard records [[spoiler:the blowing up of one part of the Houses of Parliament and the assassination of UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria]] simply as "'''Interruption.'''; Honourable Lords and Members: Oh!"
43	* VestigialEmpire:
44	** The Portuguese (Colonial) Empire declines even faster than in RealLife.
45	** [[spoiler:Only a few loyal dominions in the southern hemisphere and their client states are left over from the British Empire after the British Revolution.]]
46	* WesternTerrorists: The Irish Fenian terrorists who were bombing London at this time in real life. In this timeline they have a few more successes...
47	* WonTheWarLostThePeace: Inverted by [[spoiler:France and Imperial Russia]], losers of the War of the Dual Alliance. The former becomes a stable, prosperous republic, the latter manages to industrialize and modernize to the point that even after losing another major war it remains a great power.

Context Literature / FightAndBeRight