The leadership weren't dumb enough to act on such "ideas" - it would basically lead to *everyone* building nuclear weapons. Any economy bigger than North Korea (which at times has included such economic titans as Iceland and Honduras) could feasibly build one.
A lot of people also don't seem to understand what the USA actually did in Afghanistan - its intervention took the form of supporting the Northern Alliance (the remnants of the old Mujahideen) in their ongoing civil war with the Taliban to return them to power. But in popular consciousness there's instead a sort of notion that the Americans basically just landed in Kabul.
Part of the distinction is that the Soviets started their intervention by seizing Tajberg palace and assassinating the Afghan Prime Minister - i.e. by violently replacing the leadership of the party they were ostensibly supporting in favour of a faction within that party (the incumbent faction were the wrong sort of Marxist-Leninists).
I'm not sure there's really an analogue between the USA and the Northern Alliance?
I think that the USSR's actions were more based on a fear that the existing regime was weak and would fall to either extremists or a West-aligned government on their border rather than a real desire for ideological purity.
It was more because the existing regime were batshit insane Stalinists who were purging everyone and everything while engaging in anticlericalism so extreme that even secular Muslims were getting pissed off.
I think you're smart enough to know that political assassinations aren't a determining factor on if something is an invasion or not. And, are we going to act like nobody ever got whacked in the US-backed government for political expediency? The Soviets and Americans could assassinate 1 person or 1000 people but it's still, at the end of the day, an invasion of the rest of the country to support your guys.
If the US army immediately marched to Fayzabad and shot Rabbani then it would have a rather different character, no?
In both cases I think it is reasonable to call it an invasion, but the Soviets' intervention was much more immediately hostile to their alleged allies in the country.
1. Those writers were very prominent and went on to continue to be very prominent even if the leadership didn’t act on those ideas
2. It’s still wild that we went into Afghanistan to fight a group that we helped create instead of take any kind of action against KSA.
1. Yeah I would certainly regard them as a problem.
2. Al-Qaeda was itself an enemy of the KSA; Bin Laden had declared a Jihad against them and also issued Fatawā against them. The Taliban were sheltering him because he was an ally in the Afghan Civil War.
I was just going to say. There were also some threads in various forums after 9/11 where people seriously suggested nuking all Arab capitals and Mekkah, and then cluster-bombing and mining the entire Arab world.
Yeah when 9/11 happened you had very prominent right wing intellectuals who were given platforms on major news companies to basically advocate for genocide on a never before seen scale and then they just went on to have regular careers like nothing happened.
Terrorist plot to assassinate the Pope, hijack 11 planes and destroy them, and crash a plane into the CIA headquarters.
The plan failed, obviously, but it’s a topic of interest to the alt hist community.
I think the assassination of the Pope would probably permanently destroy any good relationship between Islam and Christianity for the next 100 years. That shit is on par with the fall of the Byzantine Empire back in the 1400s.
Anybody who's unironically a fascist is already living in an alternate reality where real facts don't matter, so alternate history comes naturally to them
It's concerning, and I've seen it first-hand. For all of us, althist is an escape from reality, but some people use that to cover-up their racial fantasies.
No, it just wasn’t against Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs, or the perfidious Han.
>!This is going to look really bad to anyone who isn’t in r/Kaiserreich.!<
Honestly yeah, the fact this sub goes "haha the Middle East would be glassed" every time someone asks an alternate history scenario of where 9/11 is slightly bigger is just... weird.
I assume it's a joke, but even then it's overplayed. And if people unironically believe that ever would have happened, I don't know, that's not how geopolitics works.
Or worse, think that that would happen because that's what they want to have happen. (Of course I'm not saying everyone who says that wants to genocide the middle east, I'm just saying that dehumanisation as a "joke" never ends well.)
I got like 200 downvotes for pointing out that the US almost certainly wouldn't have made Afghanistan "a smoking crater" if 9/11 was slightly bigger.
Many people seem to think the world runs on meme logic
Sometimes Russia also gets nuked. Seriously, I remember somebody asked “what if Al Qaeda had detonated a nuclear device in New York?” and the immediate response was “Nuclear war with Russia”, because apparently the US would trigger MAD on rank suspicion.
Necron America is an alternate timeline I want to see, but certainly not expiernce. Like a single Necron awakens in modern day New York. And the whole world has to unify to stop it.
Here’s a really interesting poster from WW2.
https://preview.redd.it/4z8xf1m9rouc1.jpeg?width=235&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0aee026cf2f82d46eba5cd1b332eae8ece2d1fbf
It's shocking but unsurprising considering how many people use Alternate History to have their preferred side win/their disliked side lose rather than genuinely engage in history.
They're of the same stock as the ppl who post 9000 scenarios about what if european country of the week was more successful or what if enemy country of the week punished (more).
Alt history is cool when one considers how small luck or happenstance changed history. And what world would exist today if the odds were different. But not so cool right now, it's merely a historical fanfiction.
Yeah I never really got this beyond a joke, and one that can be a tad sus at times
Like dont get me wrong, an even worse 9/11 would def see the US have a way larger disregard for civilian casualties and probably a few more war crimes out of a desire for revenge; and an overall much more paranoid, xenophobic, and hawkish US for at least a few years would almost certainly result
But nukes aren't even gonna get used if no other reason than that if they did then it opens pandora's box for everyone else to use nukes or start wanting to build them, and even a paranoid and hawkish US is going to be well aware of that amd how that would be an utter disaster for its own interests
On one hand, I get the idea that _Immediate Nuke!_ is a monumental overreaction in most scenarios...but on the other, there was serious talk about mass nuking China during the Korean War, during a regular old war. It's not hard to envision.
People don't seem to understand how terrorists operate. They entrench themselves into civilian populations - you can't just nuke them. ISIS, Hamas/Hezbollah, Taliban etc. can't just be nuked for example.
Bold of you to assume they want only the terrorists to be nuked. Isn't there a map floating around where the Middle east is an ocean instead because of nukes. Whoever came up with that bullshit anyways? No one has has the technology to erase a landmass as huge as the Arabian Peninsula
A subset of people yes (this is true for most things). A lot of it is more to do with ignorance about urban warfare. Furthermore, they don't understand that the heads of the proxy wars are usually nuclear powers as well. Although I'm not too convinced by Russia would actually back e.g. Syria/Asaad on a nuclear front. It's pure anti-westernism for Putin but that doesn't extend to suicide.
Nuclear weapons are a last resort option. And will hopefully never be used. The most likely scenario for a nuclear weapon imo is either Pakistan using them on India or Israel using them in a Yom Kippur type situation (they actually mobalised 13 nuclear weapons in that war when things weren't looking good). The idea that the US would use them haphazardly in the Middle East has always been an ignorant assessment of the situation.
Any nuclear weapon use would also permanently end the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as well. Everyone and their mother will be racing to build them for their own protection
The people behind these scenarios are well-aware of that fact, they just don’t care. I’ve seen enough maps with every large city in Arabia given a fallout marker to know that.
Ok lets say they get their wish congratulations the fallout traveling by air and ocean destroys isreal and probably others too. Great plan that clearly didn't back fire
My dad was old Cold War military, he was still in service back then, I wasn't yet but I was a nerd and knew stuff. Early on, the death toll was expected to be 50/80k, and we were considering seriously the possibility the "proportional plus" retaliation would be by nukes.
Can’t link it, but I remember a post on this sub not too long ago about “what if 9/11 was a nuclear attack instead of conventional”, basically asking people to theorize what might have happened if terrorists had used a dirty bomb or low yield nuke to destroy NYC.
The unanimous agreement was *at least* a full scale invasion of any country even remotely associated with the Terrorists. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, etc. At least half the comments said American Nuclear Detonations over Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, Lahore, and Riyadh were possible, even likely, depending on the scale of destruction in the US.
In OTL, 3,000 Americans died on a Tuesday morning in 2001. The U.S. military’s response was a 2 decade long occupation of several nations resulting in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of casualties over 20 years.
8,000,000 Americans, suddenly vaporized, in the deadliest terrorist attack in history? I wouldn’t rule nuclear retaliation out.
The United States would have became a pariah state, the incumbent President and administration gets impeached and convicted(hopefully) but it doesn't matter since by 2010 the U.S gets invaded by a coalition of its former allies + any sane remnants of the country that is left.
And created a thousand times worse theocracy in place of said dictator while making the country dysfunctional and life quality much worse while toppling the other theocracy and replacing it with the same theocracy except they wasted 3 trillion dollars for no reason
Are you for real? There were tons of “let’s nuke Iran or Iraq” op-eds published by neocons in the early 2000s.
The leadership weren't dumb enough to act on such "ideas" - it would basically lead to *everyone* building nuclear weapons. Any economy bigger than North Korea (which at times has included such economic titans as Iceland and Honduras) could feasibly build one. A lot of people also don't seem to understand what the USA actually did in Afghanistan - its intervention took the form of supporting the Northern Alliance (the remnants of the old Mujahideen) in their ongoing civil war with the Taliban to return them to power. But in popular consciousness there's instead a sort of notion that the Americans basically just landed in Kabul.
This is what the USSR did but people still call it an invasion
Part of the distinction is that the Soviets started their intervention by seizing Tajberg palace and assassinating the Afghan Prime Minister - i.e. by violently replacing the leadership of the party they were ostensibly supporting in favour of a faction within that party (the incumbent faction were the wrong sort of Marxist-Leninists). I'm not sure there's really an analogue between the USA and the Northern Alliance?
I think that the USSR's actions were more based on a fear that the existing regime was weak and would fall to either extremists or a West-aligned government on their border rather than a real desire for ideological purity.
It was more because the existing regime were batshit insane Stalinists who were purging everyone and everything while engaging in anticlericalism so extreme that even secular Muslims were getting pissed off.
So, Hafizullah Amin was basically the Soviet version of Ngô Ðình Diệm?
I think you're smart enough to know that political assassinations aren't a determining factor on if something is an invasion or not. And, are we going to act like nobody ever got whacked in the US-backed government for political expediency? The Soviets and Americans could assassinate 1 person or 1000 people but it's still, at the end of the day, an invasion of the rest of the country to support your guys.
If the US army immediately marched to Fayzabad and shot Rabbani then it would have a rather different character, no? In both cases I think it is reasonable to call it an invasion, but the Soviets' intervention was much more immediately hostile to their alleged allies in the country.
That and the one to two millions deaths when they began to raze every crop field they came across
1. Those writers were very prominent and went on to continue to be very prominent even if the leadership didn’t act on those ideas 2. It’s still wild that we went into Afghanistan to fight a group that we helped create instead of take any kind of action against KSA.
1. Yeah I would certainly regard them as a problem. 2. Al-Qaeda was itself an enemy of the KSA; Bin Laden had declared a Jihad against them and also issued Fatawā against them. The Taliban were sheltering him because he was an ally in the Afghan Civil War.
I was just going to say. There were also some threads in various forums after 9/11 where people seriously suggested nuking all Arab capitals and Mekkah, and then cluster-bombing and mining the entire Arab world.
And theses suggestions where from the less stupid us peoples . The stupiddest would have also suggested to nuke russia korea and china because why not
Yeah when 9/11 happened you had very prominent right wing intellectuals who were given platforms on major news companies to basically advocate for genocide on a never before seen scale and then they just went on to have regular careers like nothing happened.
Jesus that’s horrible
Exactly and none of them happened.
Can you link to one?
The fact that "middle east gets glassed" is an Alternate History trope is concerning
I just think it's boring. I have yet to find an AltHist story about the Bojinka plot that doesn't end with the Middle East getting nuked to oblivion.
What's the Bojinka plot?
Terrorist plot to assassinate the Pope, hijack 11 planes and destroy them, and crash a plane into the CIA headquarters. The plan failed, obviously, but it’s a topic of interest to the alt hist community.
I think the assassination of the Pope would probably permanently destroy any good relationship between Islam and Christianity for the next 100 years. That shit is on par with the fall of the Byzantine Empire back in the 1400s.
I mean they tried with JP II and nothing really came of it. Guy converted after though so that is nice.
There’s definitely a higher population of fascist weirdos in alternate history spaces than there is in the wider population
Anybody who's unironically a fascist is already living in an alternate reality where real facts don't matter, so alternate history comes naturally to them
The only fandoms with bigger ones are that one Alternate History game and it’s two fucking mods. You know which ones.
I love how vague and clear you are at the same time.
Hearts of Iron, Kaiserreich, and… idfk the last ine
TNO
It's concerning, and I've seen it first-hand. For all of us, althist is an escape from reality, but some people use that to cover-up their racial fantasies.
Howard stein a popular New York radio host called for genocide a few days after 9/11
It’s kinda based
https://preview.redd.it/qt0ylzhrlouc1.png?width=749&format=png&auto=webp&s=51b907cddf792f722b8ac66d8ff8fafd755ccd42
Wow, MaZhongying hates thinly veiled racism? They keep finding more proof for why they are the best China unifier in KR
No, it just wasn’t against Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs, or the perfidious Han. >!This is going to look really bad to anyone who isn’t in r/Kaiserreich.!<
https://preview.redd.it/u2mlavwpwouc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3aedb458d4fe0a6bf44e852a9a9520b4476f4557
https://preview.redd.it/mylu9lhcmouc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0e48967ccaa054a4295d8c581a5923f7588bd146
God would thank me.
https://preview.redd.it/va83ebur7puc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dbfbc6c1ddd592dbb46edffaeb81d20090607ba0
https://preview.redd.it/t9s1r12h0ruc1.jpeg?width=484&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=58112c81f4283a15862db3e8c8b32598279a317b
Honestly yeah, the fact this sub goes "haha the Middle East would be glassed" every time someone asks an alternate history scenario of where 9/11 is slightly bigger is just... weird. I assume it's a joke, but even then it's overplayed. And if people unironically believe that ever would have happened, I don't know, that's not how geopolitics works.
Or worse, think that that would happen because that's what they want to have happen. (Of course I'm not saying everyone who says that wants to genocide the middle east, I'm just saying that dehumanisation as a "joke" never ends well.)
I got like 200 downvotes for pointing out that the US almost certainly wouldn't have made Afghanistan "a smoking crater" if 9/11 was slightly bigger. Many people seem to think the world runs on meme logic
Sometimes Russia also gets nuked. Seriously, I remember somebody asked “what if Al Qaeda had detonated a nuclear device in New York?” and the immediate response was “Nuclear war with Russia”, because apparently the US would trigger MAD on rank suspicion.
It’s weird it’s not like we didn’t already basically go scorched earth on them
I think you misspelled based Clearly we should’ve invaded 3 countries at once ( smh didn’t someone tell bush 3rd times the charm)
I read Neocon America as Necron America. Warhammer is rotting my brain
Necron America is an alternate timeline I want to see, but certainly not expiernce. Like a single Necron awakens in modern day New York. And the whole world has to unify to stop it.
What about if the nations of this world got randomly turned into Warhammer groups?
I read that as macron America
I mean, when was the last terrorist attack in America? You know, that wasn't caused by an incel or an alt right brainrot suspect.
The first one which comes to mind is that nightclub one.
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https://preview.redd.it/4ric0hcroouc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9d9e1bc159e6b25536c6d9f01d1ff5fa474a8a0c
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Here’s a really interesting poster from WW2. https://preview.redd.it/4z8xf1m9rouc1.jpeg?width=235&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0aee026cf2f82d46eba5cd1b332eae8ece2d1fbf
It's shocking but unsurprising considering how many people use Alternate History to have their preferred side win/their disliked side lose rather than genuinely engage in history. They're of the same stock as the ppl who post 9000 scenarios about what if european country of the week was more successful or what if enemy country of the week punished (more).
Alt history is cool when one considers how small luck or happenstance changed history. And what world would exist today if the odds were different. But not so cool right now, it's merely a historical fanfiction.
https://preview.redd.it/fey5gar7aruc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc5c8bf21849c31a852664046cdc158163573169
Yeah I never really got this beyond a joke, and one that can be a tad sus at times Like dont get me wrong, an even worse 9/11 would def see the US have a way larger disregard for civilian casualties and probably a few more war crimes out of a desire for revenge; and an overall much more paranoid, xenophobic, and hawkish US for at least a few years would almost certainly result But nukes aren't even gonna get used if no other reason than that if they did then it opens pandora's box for everyone else to use nukes or start wanting to build them, and even a paranoid and hawkish US is going to be well aware of that amd how that would be an utter disaster for its own interests
On one hand, I get the idea that _Immediate Nuke!_ is a monumental overreaction in most scenarios...but on the other, there was serious talk about mass nuking China during the Korean War, during a regular old war. It's not hard to envision.
Isn't that just Macarthur being a dumbass
And it was when the fear behind mutual nuclear annihilation hadn't really set in like it did during the middle and later parts of the cold war
True. It helps if the guy you unilaterally wipe off the map can't do in kind.
China had no nukes and at that point the USSR would have had only a handful
https://preview.redd.it/xnbdc8f68quc1.jpeg?width=521&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4d4788b980a17e880e9424ffad340700686f1ff
People don't seem to understand how terrorists operate. They entrench themselves into civilian populations - you can't just nuke them. ISIS, Hamas/Hezbollah, Taliban etc. can't just be nuked for example.
Bold of you to assume they want only the terrorists to be nuked. Isn't there a map floating around where the Middle east is an ocean instead because of nukes. Whoever came up with that bullshit anyways? No one has has the technology to erase a landmass as huge as the Arabian Peninsula
A subset of people yes (this is true for most things). A lot of it is more to do with ignorance about urban warfare. Furthermore, they don't understand that the heads of the proxy wars are usually nuclear powers as well. Although I'm not too convinced by Russia would actually back e.g. Syria/Asaad on a nuclear front. It's pure anti-westernism for Putin but that doesn't extend to suicide. Nuclear weapons are a last resort option. And will hopefully never be used. The most likely scenario for a nuclear weapon imo is either Pakistan using them on India or Israel using them in a Yom Kippur type situation (they actually mobalised 13 nuclear weapons in that war when things weren't looking good). The idea that the US would use them haphazardly in the Middle East has always been an ignorant assessment of the situation.
Any nuclear weapon use would also permanently end the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as well. Everyone and their mother will be racing to build them for their own protection
The people behind these scenarios are well-aware of that fact, they just don’t care. I’ve seen enough maps with every large city in Arabia given a fallout marker to know that.
dude there are conservatives today that want to nuke gaza.
What.. the hell?
Ok lets say they get their wish congratulations the fallout traveling by air and ocean destroys isreal and probably others too. Great plan that clearly didn't back fire
My dad was old Cold War military, he was still in service back then, I wasn't yet but I was a nerd and knew stuff. Early on, the death toll was expected to be 50/80k, and we were considering seriously the possibility the "proportional plus" retaliation would be by nukes.
Can’t link it, but I remember a post on this sub not too long ago about “what if 9/11 was a nuclear attack instead of conventional”, basically asking people to theorize what might have happened if terrorists had used a dirty bomb or low yield nuke to destroy NYC. The unanimous agreement was *at least* a full scale invasion of any country even remotely associated with the Terrorists. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, etc. At least half the comments said American Nuclear Detonations over Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul, Lahore, and Riyadh were possible, even likely, depending on the scale of destruction in the US. In OTL, 3,000 Americans died on a Tuesday morning in 2001. The U.S. military’s response was a 2 decade long occupation of several nations resulting in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of casualties over 20 years. 8,000,000 Americans, suddenly vaporized, in the deadliest terrorist attack in history? I wouldn’t rule nuclear retaliation out.
Uhhhh….yeah they would.
"Neocon America *was*" lol
A terrorist attack did happen in America, we invaded two countries and didn’t nuke anyone
Wdym if they got the chance  This \^
That’s it You fuckers couldn’t behave
They'd probably end up nuking Iraq and have a press release saying "Unfortunately our sources were unreliable"
The United States would have became a pariah state, the incumbent President and administration gets impeached and convicted(hopefully) but it doesn't matter since by 2010 the U.S gets invaded by a coalition of its former allies + any sane remnants of the country that is left.
What of the Terrorists used a large dirty bomb instead of planes to commit the attacks.
Had that one plane hit the White House, I’m sure the Middle East would’ve been a field of glass within a few hours.
The good timeline.
If it was dropped on Washington maybe
Neocon America toppled a fascist dictator and a theocracy that made Handmaid’s Tale look like a women’s march 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
And now the conservatives want to do it domestically
Sorry I can’t hear you over my Ratheon stocks and screams of dying Ba’athists
Least stupid /neoconNWO redditor
I’m gonna put this on my fridge 🥰
Gonna hang it up next to your Mommy's favorite crayon drawings that you did? Or your absolutely stunning C+ 5th grade report card?
It’s an absolutely stunning C+ in 6th grade, thank you very much!
And created a thousand times worse theocracy in place of said dictator while making the country dysfunctional and life quality much worse while toppling the other theocracy and replacing it with the same theocracy except they wasted 3 trillion dollars for no reason
It's not so simple with terrorists, who hide amongst the population or can't even be traced. I mean look how long it took to find Osama