Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

I am just saying the depiction of a CSA that won wouldn't look like what it did in the mockumentary of it in 2004. It would be weaker than it was depicted in the modern day, and wouldn't be the dystopia that was depicted in the movie. Heck, the Civil Right's movement would probably still happen, and I wonder if they are going to do that after they do the post-Civil War stuff.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/CSATheConfederateStatesOfAmerica?from=Main.CSAConfederateStatesOfAmerica

I mean I wouldn't be quite so optimistic about it. A country explicitly founded on slavery is a bit different from one founded on "can we please not talk about this for another 50 years?"

I see no reason to believe a CSA without slavery would actually exist and wouldn't just be a bunch of states all squabbling with each other after a civil war.

Probably would just get reabsorbed by the US at that point.

I would imagine a state like that would resemble North Korea more than anything else.

I mean they'd define themselves by an enmity with a more successful neighbor who they neither won nor lost to.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:11:59 PM by Clarste

It would take a lot of different circumstances to become North Korea. I also think that eventually even the CSA would have to give up slavery, but they still would enact Jim Crow as I said before.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:13:15 PM by firewriter

Nah, they'd die before they ever gave up their reason for existing. The civil war wasn't about self determination, it was only about slavery.

Even the survival of the nationstate was second to the Confederate government to slavery.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:14:41 PM by LeGarcon

The CSA in the Harry Turtledove series did end up abolishing slavery. But only because continued aid from Britain and France against the US required it.

That CSA was eventually reconquered - after being nuked to hell - by the US during WWII but by then it had already conducted a Holocaust on its own black population.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:16:01 PM by Parable

From your point of view, but from theirs they thought it was self-determination. The thing is you portray everything as just going to be as one minded, when as people have said those who are in charge are going to change hands and eventually people are going to have to give up on their stances.

I want to ask what reason did they give for doing their own version of the Holocaust on their black citizens.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:20:31 PM by firewriter

No they didn't. A quote was just posted where they gave their own reasons (slavery). The self-determination thing was made up after the war ended to make the South feel less bad about reintegration.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:19:55 PM by Clarste

No? They didn't. Stephens literally said it's about slavery and only slavery and the only reason they're seceding is because the North doesn't like slaves anymore.

The idea of the Civil War being about state's rights or self determination isn't even that old. It wasn't invented until the 1960s as an argument for Southerners to use during the Civil Rights Movement.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:21:29 PM by LeGarcon

Remember that there are reasonably large, stable feudal states active in the world today. Again, Saudi Arabia is the emblematic example. Resource wealth can get you a long way.

Perhaps the more interesting question would be what the rest of the world would look like if the USA was too fractured to become a superpower due to a frozen North-South conflict. Assuming World War I went roughly the same way (not a guarantee), we'd probably be looking at the USSR as a largely unrivalled global hegemon, Britain having a lot more incentive to try to keep its crumbling empire together, and possibly the survival of Imperial Japan - if the Russians didn't nuke them. God only knows what would happen to Africa.

That would be a scary thought about an unopposed USSR due to America being fractured.

I mean if it wasn't for us developing the bomb there's a very strong chance they could have taken all of Germany and France, possibly even pushing into Spain.

They weren't planning on stopping in Berlin at any rate.

The idea of a world conquered by the Soviets would be an absolute nightmare for anyone who grew up during the Cold War.

On the other hand, a pan-European anti-communist military alliance could have been formed against the USSR, which also could actually be smaller territorially than it actually was due to increased Allied involvement in the Russian Civil War; US isolationist attitudes played a massive role in the withdrawal of American forces in Real Life.

The Pacific is where things get tricky, as the US throughly possessed the West Coast throughout the Civil War. With the crucial seaports of San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Pearl Harbor in Union hands, plus a Phillipines still firmly within the US' orbit, Imperial Japan still would have had faced resistance from the US in their Strike South initiative. However, their gambit to force the US to negotiate through an initial strategic offensive has a much better chance of succeeding.

In China however, Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists would find himself in an either better or worse place than he was ever in Real Life. The US and pan-European alliance could throw their lot in his regime to use as a buffer state against the Japanese threat to their colonial holdings, or throw him under the bus and force him to cede even more land to Japan in order to earn the latter's partnership in the event of a global conflict with the Soviets.

Damn, what a Nation States role play we all could write.

Thing is there's more than just the issue of the Confederacy surviving the Civil War, there's the question of why the much more powerful Union did not anex it, why immediately after the war the Confederacy didn't fail.

Even if the Confederacy was willing to give up slavery eventually it would not happen quickly, it would take 3-4 generations being in power at best, so how does it survive for thsoue 3-4 generations? Does it have its own Civil War? Why does the Union not intervene on one side and gobble up a bunch of states then?

You're not just altering history by allowing the Confederacy to establish peace and surviving the Civil War, you're altering economics and geopolitics by allowing it to make it from a post-Civil War country to anything resembling the modern age.

When is the show meant to be set? Are we talking just after the Civil War ends or the modern day?

I can't help but think we're putting more thought into this than the showrunners.

Unfortunately, I agree. This looks like an unmitigated disaster waiting to happen, and if it gets off the ground I hope it crashes and burns immediately. The last thing this country needs is another 'what if' story giving low information viewers the impression the Confederacy was not gutterslime through and through. Look at the shit we are still dealing with after hack historians created the fiction of the 'Clean Wehrmacht'.

edited 24th Jul '17 4:26:01 PM by ViperMagnum357

I pray they do their research when going into this Alternate History, and try to make it a plausible thing.

The only alternative history concept involving the confederacy that I've liked ended with a slave revolt resulting in a predominately black nation with strong ties to other Caribbean nations with a similar background.

Which seems more likely than the confederacy deciding to treat black people like people.

I'm not sure which is more likely, both are incredibly unlikely (if not outright impossible).

While that did happened in Haiti, with the CSA it wouldn't at all be feasible. Also as I keep saying nations are not one minded stagnant beings, but are ever growing and eventually have to rethink about what they are doing is wrong or right.

edited 24th Jul '17 7:09:55 PM by firewriter

The CSA would only give up slavery if the alternative was complete economic collapse and destruction. And maybe not even then. The entire reason the Confederacy existed was because they refused to let go of the notion that they had the right to own black people. That was something that went beyond economics. It was about power.

edited 24th Jul '17 7:16:45 PM by M84

The southern states were already facing economic collapse for keeping slavery and their response was to secede and basically make a suicide run against the north before even entertaining the idea of abolition.

While the CSA would have kept slavery for long, saying that they would have had it to the modern day is unrealistic. By the logic, Brazil should still have since it took longer for them to get rid of slavery.