Stuff like this is why I love Charlie Stross.
The year is 1950 -- but it's not our 1950. Things began to go off the rails, history-wise, in 1917-1918. Lawrence of Arabia was shot dead at the gates of Damascus, for example: the whole face of the middle east is utterly different. Trotsky had flu in October 1917 — the Bolshevik revolution happened in early 1918, and Stalin got himself killed in the process. Because of the late Russian collapse, World War One ended differently in this universe: the Kaisershlacht started in June (not April), the German high command collapsed in January 1919, and Germany was actually occupied by Allied forces (including the first large-scale deployment of what would later be called Blitzkrieg warfare — this was actually planned, but never used because of the German capitulation in November 1918). Germany was invaded, subjugated — no support for the "stab in the back" theory that Hitler used so effectively.
(In this world, Hitler ends up in Spandau prison in 1923: but instead of being there for treason, he's there for sexual offenses. He later becomes a gangster in Hamburg, and features in the Plot. Ditto Mussolini; he doesn't become Duce. In fact, in this world, Fascism is invented in Britain.)
Trotsky follows Lenin, and a series of bloody skirmishes are fought on the borders of the Soviet empire during the 1920's. Then the Great Depression arrives more or less on schedule, and everything goes to pieces. Britain has been trying to hold on to empire much harder in this history than in our own. Imperialism breeds repression breeds ... well, the results aren't pretty. In 1937, Moseley's New Party seizes power and declares a Republic. There's a worldwide clampdown as the Republican Empire tries to hang on to its assets with a bulldog grip. Moseley is followed in 1942 by Chairman Blair, veteran leader of the Authority's forces during the Spanish Civil War. Britain is under the grip of a grey, iron dictatorship aimed squarely at defying the looming forces of Communism, that squat on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone that is Germany.
By 1950, World War Two is imminent — and it's going to be a war between the Republican Empire and the Soviet Union. America is beginning to awaken >from a period of isolationism, punctuated by a short and inconclusive war with Japan in the mid-1940's; far-seeing diplomats realise that if they allow Fascism to take over the fragile democracies of the DMZ they'll end up standing alone against whichever dictatorship wins. And so they start a rearmament program and create an organisation — the OSS by any other name — to send agents into Europe and figure out what's going on.
Read more at www.antipope.org
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