A Shitlib pop history youtuber who makes lowbrow “what if” slop and has been recently getting into obnoxious slap fights with random communists and anarchists on Bird-site also has far right fans? Huh
That's what I'm thinking. They think actual communists pointing that out means we are "offended" when we're just amused/bewildered they think it's a flex. Especially when even average Joe Schmoes don't think good things when they think "Red Scare" or "McCarthyism".
Hey guys, what's that little birdie by the stub of the bayonet? It couldn't possibly be a nazi symbol, right?
Anti-history youtuber's fans happen to be fascists, someone bring out the pikachu meme.
Italian is one of those languages where parodying it doesn't actually do it justice.
"You see, nazis are actually socialists because they called themselves national socialists."
"I repeatedly keep identifying with national socialists all the time. Isn't that funny?"
Sounds like they're the real socialists, not us. We're just civic libertarians.
Anybody that studies history and ends up right wing is either studying national origin myths like they're marvel superheroes or has a Nazi soul.
A nazi soul is unscientific. They are made of Hitler Particles.
cody is like really, really bad at alt-history. i say this as a fan and life long reader.
his show sucks. doesn't surprise me he's alt-right adjacent.
since i'm bitching: most alt-history writers are shit too. like the guy who did the "domination of draka" series which is just fascist wankfest. also none of them understand materialism.
only good alt-history guy is Matt Christman and the other guy on his hinge points podcast
Robert Silverberg is a sometimes a good alt-history writer, Christman has praised him. When he's at his best he's drawing parallels between divergent ruling classes and our own. He's at his worst when he's getting deep into the idealism, like his alternate Rome that survives to the modern day because Christianity was never invented, and so the western and eastern Roman Empires never fought one another. You got it right. Alt-history guys usually don't understand materialism.
Kim Stanely Robinson wrote a pretty good alt-history novel, "Years of Rice and Salt." The premise is the black plague kills 99% of Europe, so it's a world without white people. So the whole world is split between various Chinese and Muslim states. It's a good novel because it's from the perspective of two people who keep getting reincarnated. There's a chapter where one of them is a tiger.
omg i forgot about KSR!! i love the years of rice and salt. KSR radicalized me literally my first introduction to socialism from the Mars Trilogy to that.
the only thing about the years of rice and salt is I wish we could get longer stories out of some of the short stories from the bardo group. i really, really wanted an expansion of the japanese diaspora basically arming the Iroquois with steel working, weapons and gunpowder and having political marriages
so much potential for it's own novel
I wouldn't call him "alt-right adjacent". More just your run of the mill anti-communist shitlib who may or may not vote Sanders. The fact that he has far right fans is more just that the specific brand of low-effort althist gruel panders to the kind of audience who are susceptible to it otherwise.
Shitlib Content creators asking "jeez why do I have so many fascist followers on social media??? Anyway here's why communists were worse than the Nazis, sponsored by creatinine packed GamerSups"
Don Quixote is smiling on them.
Dude, you guys won the cold war already. Give it a rest. You won the whole damn thing, and how are you STILL not happy?
They won the Cold War and the world didn't instantly get better. In fact, everything seems to be slowly getting worse. There are no grand aspirations for humanity anymore. Every new technology is met with justified skepticism because people know it'll be used to fire as many workers as possible. They just don't connect it back to capitalism. In fact, when shit goes wrong today, people STILL blame communism for it.
I honestly wonder sometimes what could drive someone to be so spiteful and bitter towards people who have the audacity to imagine a better reality, especially when they have no material incentive to be like that.
I don't know if a pervasive sense of entropic hopelessness is technically a material condition, but it's not like they're immune to it. They need something to blame
"Wtf this house I built on the sand keeps on shifting, this fucking sucks"
i don't understand why althist on youtube is so fucking awful. are they just people that got bullied off the forums? on youtube they're always doing shit like "aXis ViCtoRy???" when that was so thoroughly whipped on alternatehistory dot com "sealion" was slang for unbelievable plot developments.
is there a different chud fantasy site that does "althistory"?
Althistory in general is fucking awful. Most people who are into it don't actually bother to understand history or why historical events occured. They don't go "What if X historical thing didn't happen, how would that change things?" Instead they go "Hey, I want xyz version of history to be true, how can I retroactively change things to get to my preconceived conclusion?" They start with their goals and move backwards, it isn't an exercise in academic curiosity, it's mental masturbation for them. It's them pretending that the world works the exact way they think it does instead of trying to actually learn how it works.
things that get published (or made into youtube videos) sure, but speculative historiography is part and parcel to the regular craft, you can't make a statement like "this could've happened if not for" without dabbling. when it's materialist and well researched, it's very educational and can promote good practices and theories.
"make new amsterdam stay dutch" can either be a dutch nationalist rant, or a discourse on the currents of 17th century colonialism and capitalist development
I probably came off a bit confrontational there, I didn't mean to disparage your hobby, I just have a lot of personal dislike for it and the sort of people who tend to frequent the more...reddit-esque and youtube spaces. People who have no love of history or desire to understand it, but want to pretend they can then imagine "alternate history" in any meaningful way. I think we're complaining about the same people really, I was just too vague and general in my statement.
i've completely fallen off of it actually, i used to dabble but actual research seems to take the same spot in the brain, lol. i just really admired and appreciated like, actually citationed threads on the old forums that legitimately 'did history' but in a casual setting. bit of a rose-tint nostalgia is there too i'm sure.
for sure the primary way people are interfacing with 'althistory' now though is through these video-interlocutors and they are like, all fascists . i'm talking about a comparatively niche lil thing. it probably was never more significant than Turtledove novels, lol
"Buh buh but History is when great man does X and is totally not a more complex interaction of factors and how societies and people react in macro and micro!!!"
What communist is vying for Europe? China? Lol. They’re not the ones siphoning industries from Europeans.
I don't trust any history nerd who doesn't know how to build a Molotov cocktail
I wouldn't trust my back anyone who thinks stuffing a piece of cloth into a whiskey bottle is a good enough fire bottle. You gotta have professional mindset for this stuff
Exactly this, you need a proper mix of thickening agent and fuel especially if you target cars or other mobile targets
Can't forget ignition source safety, reliability, and redundancy. People always discount the most important part of the design.
A tooth should fall out of your skull every time you utter the phrase "I did nazi that coming"
Congratulations sir! You win the internet! I'm too poor for Reddit gold but can give you this XDXDXDXD
Never liked Alt-History stuff. You can always tell it's someone living in the Global North when they touch upon any country that isn't European or the US.
Anecdotal but a lot of the better stories I've read have always had a significant amount of focus put on a Global South nation or, better yet, North American First Nations people. It's a generally good litmus test between sheltered people who don't want to go outside the confines of their worldview and those who want to study history by the details.
So do I. Which is why I find it funny that they're trying to use it as a slur