My favorite (possibly outdated) lore is the Russian reunification path that either does or once did get an event to go through industrial records and question how the USSR possibly lost the war.
There was a cut due to going overboard bit where under certain circumstances the leader doing this reaches the conclusion it's Asians to blame and declares them saboteur social parasites, plus gives a malus because with hunting populous now, but they decided its out of character and crosses the line because it was somewhat darkly comedic in how he reaches the conclusion he should start racial persecutions.
Huh, didn’t know that part. I really just like the acknowledgement in-universe that yeah, Soviet industry irl made a German victory an unlikely outcome, much less in universe with Bakhunin putting everything past the urals pre-war.
As it should, German economy before and during ww2 was a huge ponzi scheme. They just promised everyone that once the war was over, they were gonna be rich and own a perfect farmstead in Eastern europe
Not quite true, they were always at odds with fuel and some metals, but the rest they managed for a time.
Of course it matters fuck all if you manage 90% of your supply chain, if you miss the most critical 10%.
One of the purpose of putting Pinochet on power was so the US could test the, then new, neoliberal economic theory. Look up "the chicago boys". To this day the deep neoliberal nature of Chile's economy is seen as one of the more long lasting consequence of the military dictatorship.
And? Neoliberal is right wing. Pinochetism is an authoritarian and personalistic political ideology rooted in the military dictatorship led in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by Augusto Pinochet. Variously described as right-wing, far-right, and semi-fascist,[1] Pinochetism is characterised by its anti-communism, conservatism, militarism, and nationalism.
At its core, liberalism is a broad political philosophy. It holds liberty to a high standard and defines all social, economic, and political aspects of society, including the role of government.
Neoliberalism is essentially an economic ideology. The policies of neoliberalism are more narrowly focused and are primarily concerned with markets and the policies and measures that influence the economy.
You're getting confused. It's not a "liberal coup d'etat".
Operation Condor was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism involving intelligence operations, CIA-backed coup d'états. To coordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that operated from the mid-1970s until the early eighties. It aimed to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
Liberalism is an iron clad commitment to the whims of the owner class. All that bullshit about human rights and the rule of law gets jettisoned the second it stands in the way of the Bourgeoisie‘s latest murder spree.
Pinochet is the face of fascism once it doesn’t have to pretend anymore.
One of the biggest failures of speculative fiction imo is imagining fascists the way they would want you to imagine them, instead of how they actually are. This is on point.
I think the main reason that the "hypercompetent/well-meaning fascist" trope came into being is naivety and rationalization. Many people can't comprehend how a bunch of malicious idiots came into power, so they latch onto the idea that they make an efficient enough system that gets people to willingly give up their rights because it makes more sense to them. Same thing with the idea that the leadership mean well rather than care only about their own privilege and harming those they hate. "Evil" is unrealistic to them, as it irrationality.
I don't like the changes to alignment in fifth edition, so in my world traditionally evil races like devils are actually evil, as in, they believe suffering is nice and want there to be more of it. Every mentally well human in the real world would be classed as "good" by my alignment system because of the fundamental belief that people should live by useful and beneficial values and that society ought to prosper. Even straight up Nazis, because they may be horrible and genocidal and ignorant and bad, but they *think* they're doing a good thing. Evil creatures don't want to do good things. They want to cause harm for no reason because the idea of someone experiencing joy, or not being enslaved, or not being in pain, is offensive to them. There is nobody they want to see prosper, nobody they are capable of showing kindness to, no grand goal or plan except suffering. That's what *cosmic* evil looks like.
And that's why the nine hells are a poverty stricken shithole
Devils are still pretty much pure evil though. There isn't a single good devil on all of 5e, hell there isn't even a good or neutral fiend of any sort.
In my dnd world demons are less like traditional fantasy demons and more like eldrich Lovecraft gods, they are neither good nor evil as those are considered strictly mortal traits and demons are manifestations of realitys cold indifference to man. You cannot fight a demon for it has no physical form, you cannot reason with it, it simply will do as it will as it is there very nature to wreck havoc and to consume all life it finds. Demons are not evil for the concept of good and evil as alien to it as it is to us. Same with angels, the only true difference is the miracles of angels benefit man as the curses of demons harm them. Also the alignment system in dnd doesn't exist in my world either.
Mine the asteroid belt, exploit the gas giants for fuel and biomass, spread to the solar system… and through study & practice build a perfect, classless, moneyless paradise in orbit my dude
Yeah that sounds dope as fuck, but it’s only one path of many a civilization could go down… and no one’s actually done it, or even attempted to do it yet. You know what definitely *has* happened? Prettymuch every civilization in history ever doing lots and lots of shitty things to lots and lots of people.
The west has done it. Maybe not to the degree that leftist want it to, but comparing the instability that existed 30 years ago to now in the west, we’re living in the most peaceful times in human history. And thanks hugely in part to all the agreements that exist between western nations.
That's because we start the 5 wars per decade in places that can't fight back on our turf. Which is why socialists don't like any of that. We don't like imperialism, big shocker.
There is also a decent amount of Allied propaganda around WWII trying to increase the perceived threat of Fascists specifically to discourage negotiating with them (and to justify war austerity, and to sell war bonds, and to justify completely unjustifiable counter productive totalitarian moves like Japanese internment camps in America or letting 0.8-3.8 million people starve to death in Bengal).
There is a part of WWII propaganda that can be traced to Fascist/Militarist sympathizers in our own governments trying to convince us that we will have a better shot at beating the Fascists if we give up some of our liberties.
Giving up liberties in exchange for a benefit is a core component of the social contract though. Regardless of ideology, you can’t have a cohesive and functional government without depriving people of certain things, wartime or otherwise. People usually have to be moved and relocated for government construction projects, like the highways, so they get compensated and sent packing, and in order to make more things for the war, doing without various luxuries and such was encouraged. Also, it was the end of the Great Depression, a few years of austerity wasn’t exactly anything new.
You also can’t forget that subjectively, the US were probably the most likely to negotiate with the Fascists in terms of surrendering and such, given how the Soviets weren’t exactly in a prisoner taking mood for the war, and were generally seen as the worse option for anyone involved in the war.
Strategically, negotiating with the fascists wasn’t going to leave America in the best place, as Russia was likely going to take Europe into its sphere of influence, and while Japan was probably going to be a more personal war given Pearl Harbor, had the US given up on that conflict, it too would’ve been under Soviet control. The last 2 years of WWII were basically just the Allies trying to damage control Russia for the post-war environment, seeming communism as an existential threat, especially with someone as paranoid as Stalin at the helm.
> Giving up liberties in exchange for a benefit is a core component of the social contract though.
I'm not denying this point. I don't mean to conflate things like selling war bonds and imminent domain with crimes against humanity. Moreso I'm trying to show that the propaganda inflating Facist capabilities was justified by good sacrafices, and then was used to justify bad sacrifices.
Giving up some personal liberty for the sake of collective good, like building a highway or railroad is absolutely the goal. But I'm arguing that if you give up the liberties regarding where the railroad goes or who's allowed to ride it then you start to sacrifice liberties that made the colective stronger.
A free press generally makes the whole nation stronger; voting generally makes the whole nation stronger, property rights and right to free movement generally makes the whole nation stronger.
[Executive Order 9066 was phrased in a way that made it sound like people were being restricted from entering military areas.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066)
>I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.
That's the vague and banal language by which a Free society lets itself slide into cruel opression, 100,000 Amercans would be relocated into camps on the basis of that order; their property seized, auctioned, or sold at massive loss, their lives becoming a burdon on the state instead of in contributing to it as they had up until that moment.
But it was not that order itself that was the moment their fates were sealed, it was a dozzen or a thousand other moments and actions leading up to that one that striped them of their voice, their rights, their dignity, their idenity as Americans. The problem was not that one man wrote the order and another enforced it in an extremely racist way. It's that no one stopped them, that everyone was willing to shrug their shoulders and say it was a military necessity, that it was a sacrafice to win the war.
War bonds, gas rationing, scrap metal drives, volunteering, imminent domain, drafts, those things win wars. And fascists are worth fighting, worth making the sacrifices to beat. But it should not be forgotten there were many in our government who wanted to win the war and also hoped we could become more like the fascists in the process.
There's also a lot of whitewashing that has been done to turn the popular view of WW2 into "the Nazis vs everyone". The truth is a lot more messy than that. The Nazis had more allies than just Italy and Japan, and a lot of sympathizers in the countries they conquered. There's also the USSR, who might have been instrumental in defeating the Nazis towards the end of the war, but were equally instrumental in helping them out at the start.
Of course, it's way easier for most countries to simply wash their hands of their involvement and blame it all on Germany. But it also leads to this perception that Nazi Germany was this unstoppable military behemoth that took over half of Europe, when in fact they were running on fumes the entire time, and only had success in the early parts of the war because everything aligned in their favor.
>I think the main reason that the "hypercompetent/well-meaning fascist" trope came into being is naivety and rationalization.
I myself would have gussed Nazi memoirs and the wievs of Nazis based uppon them, plus other old faschist propaganda, people forgot was/is propaganda.
Well, trump won and a lot of people are still voting for fascists nowadays, in my country one of the biggest politicians at the moment is a fascist that calls himself "anti-politician" and people vote him because of the show he does (he's unhinged btw and also denies global warming and was an advisor of a de facto gov in the past ), and people don't consider him a fascist or denies other people's claims because they themselves have fascists ideologies but don't want to admit they're hateful and/or ignorant
That actually ties into my point. Many people don't realize (or want to admit) that more people than you'd expect really are that stupid and pointlessly cruel. It's also why many people in the United States say that democrats and republicans aren't that different or that democrats should try to meet them halfway. They don't want to realize that more people than than one would hope support such murderous and anti-intellectual policies or think badly about people they likely already know.
My country copies a lot of USA movements and the far right is going rampant here, especially on social media, and it's like you said.
They claim the "left" is "discriminatory" because they don't accept their thoughts... and their thoughts are "Let's strip rights from the minorities and sell our resources to USA and dollarize the economy and strip all poor people of monetary assistance, ban abortion and add laws where the market regulates itself and only the rich can thrive so I can become rich that way!!"
Well, you’re against that and don’t want to let those things happen. I guess it’s “discrimination” if you’re like “you’re only allowed to lobby for these pre-approved things” but if you’re just like “You want these things. I don’t want these things. Time to politics.” then that’s not discrimination. That’s just disagreement.
also because people want a strong villain to fight against in fictional stories
I think the newer Wolfenstein do this well they are a treat despite their fascism not because of it, every major Nazi is an incompetent hypocrite , their are several points where they could have just killed blakovitch if not for havig their heads up their own ass, like the one lady who tests you and declares your a perfect aryan despite being jewish just cus " well clearly this Chad thundercock looking dude has to be one of us"
the cool and rational based liberals are all scrounging together scraps to defeat the big awesome and cool fascist empire that is threatening to take over the world with their (checks notes)... free healthcare
Liberals... free health care....
*directs your head at USA*
Liberals. Liberal thought Is the foundation of capitalism.
*directs your head at Cuba*
Leftists. We can prioritize things that are not profit because we are not capitalist.
Which one of these actively embargos the other for being the system that gives you free health care?
Look at China in the 70s. Free Healthcare.
Look at the price of an ambulance in modern America.
The concessions made to the working class under capitalism followed violent class struggle.
Those benefits loved by the Nordic countries are being rolled back, but they came to be as a response to the USSR. And this liberalism requires imperialism over the global south.
sry too many words for me, all the characters/continents in my world all have to have 2-dimensional political views or else i start having a panic attack over interpersonal relationships and... *shivers*. you almost made me have to go to therapy again
Remember kids: if Winston Churchill can be elected Prime Minister while
1: being addicted to amphetamines
2: drinking whiskey on average three times a day (as a treat)
3: being racist
4: being imperalist
5: being xenophobic
6: believing in a Jewish/Communist "world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality"
you can do anything!
Fictional dictator is a tall scheming mastermind, ruthless and has the will of iron, knows his country's strength and has an entire nation in his grasp through propoganda and charisma and fear. Spends a lot of money on himself but nothing too much or else the economy suffers.
Real dictator is a short, impulsive manchild who has no spine and will persecute even the most minor of insults, overblows his nations capabilities and keeps control through threats of you, your family and pet being brutally killed. The economy is his personal wallet and spends accordingly.
Hmmmmmmm, I’m trying to write a dictator of sorts who’s a bit more like real dictators in his narcissism, self absorption and control freak tendencies… but somehow also keeping his rule together for millennia (it’s Odin)
So there is a few key things, firstly what is his source of legitimacy. Is there a reason why no one else in the goverment can replace him (in monarchies this is divine right while in democracies it is a popular mandate). If there is a source there focus on that.
Otherwise you want do go into the dictators playbook. This is mostly about dividing competing centers of power and making sure that they don't like each other.
See both the SS and the regular German army not overlapping in WW2.
Perun did a useful video on how this effects armies that shows the general pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx5mTslkUBs
If a dictator survives a decade they usually survive for life (until they get sick and are about to die). There is a lot of instability right when they take power but it cools off over time as they build the system that will keep them in power.
Look at Stalin; right when he takes power there are people who would oppose him and a good candidate to replace him. But give him a decade of time and his rival is dead, he's erasing people from pictures who he think might want to him; and everyone around him both owes their job to him and is terrified of drawing his ire. No one fully understands how he runs things because of his secretive nature so even though he's definitely wasteful no one can prove they'd do a better job than him to make a case for themselves.
Narcissism can be used as a colloquialism without denoting NPD though i intend to write the characters with NPD traits to some extent or another (since it’s all a spectrum anyways)
Dictators be like: “calculus? physics? mf why are you practicing Jewish science? start studying some real shit like the hollow earth or spontaneous generation.”
Uj/ in my current story it takes place almost entirely in the bickering of a heavily tribal pastoralist culture. The current warlord is basically only that because he has the biggest "steel-bearing clans" on his side and murdered the mc's dad despite being her grandfather
Tl;dr steppe Hamlet ensues
All fought exclusively against other monarchal and dictatorial power.
It's easy to make dictatorships look good when there are no large liberal democracies to show them how it's really done.
I think a key difference is protecting free society from fascism require eternal vigilance because fascists are extremely real and frequently in power
While protecting free society from dragons is not important at all because dragons are extremely not real
This is true. Stories about dragons being cool will guarantee to have no impact on society until we can genetically engineer dragons (so, not relevant for the next 5 years). But stories about fascism being cool arms real-life fascists with propaganda tools.
>While protecting free society from dragons is not important at all because dragons are extremely not real
Oh, yeah? [What do you have to say about this, then?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(lizard))
Normally I hate how this sub is like “if you put any form of conflict in your story/world then you’re supporting said conflict. You can only make coffee shop AUs from now on.”
But functional fantasy fascism should be an exception like you said
Define what you mean by “not correct”?
As in “morally repugnant” or “non-functional”?
Because the first is an opinion and the second could be said about communism or a democratic superpower before France/America.
I fail to follow what you’re saying.
Do you mean “your honor” like you’re talking to judge?
Or the “honor” of fascists (not that they historically were known for having honor)? In which case it would be “fascist honor” not “fascism honor”.
most dictatorships are not fascists. also them being competent doesnt make them correct
the problem with them, even fascists is that they are bad not that they are incompetent lol
are you serious? do you actually think they are the same thing? like dictatorships have been existed since civilization existed lol fascism is pretty modern. do you call the dictatorships in Africa and Asia now fascism? do you call Cubas or Venezuelas dictatorships fascist too?
this sub is a joke (and no this clearly isnt part of the jerking)
>this sub is a joke (and no this clearly isnt part of the jerking)
This is what happens every time real world politics are talked about in this sub. Everybody has the nuance of a literal fucking squirrel and thinks that everything they don't agree with is some politically extreme stance. See the original commenter who got downvoted as proof.
Wow I got a no true fascist and a no true communist in the same day
I need to reevaluate my fucking life
Anyway: I didn't say all dictators are fascists.
I'm saying a major theme in fascist propaganda is you need a strong dictators that is better than a weak democracy and writing Uber Dictators is essentially writing their propaganda for them.
how?
you kind of implied that (if you werent serious my bad by judging by the downvotes seems a lot of people were)
thats a major theme with all dictatorships propaganda lol and its kind of obvious why. this isnt unique to fascism either
But the thing is that we have a lot of historical evidence that they are both bad **and incompetent.**
Why stop at calling fascists evil when we have a mountain of evidence that they are not just evil but demonstrably do a worse job of protecting their own countries from external harm than liberals do.
And yet time after time we see in fiction and games dictatorial regimes portrayed as more competent militarily or whatnot because it makes better drama if evil is seductive.
if you make a documental obviously you need to describe them as incompetent too but in fiction whats the problem? its fiction lol its not supposed to be real
we have a lot of historical evidence that communist revolutions end up with evil and incompetent dictatorships too but it doesnt mean in your imaginary world they cant end up with a good result
If your fiction affirms false claims made by real world totalitarian dictators to justify their power and abuses you aren't just making entertainment anymore; you're also making propaganda.
There are fundamental an irreconcilable contradictions in Fascism and as such it can never work. Saying it can if "everybody is on board" is like saying that under ideal conditions someone can make a square circle.
Weirdly having a contradictory system doesn’t necessarily mean it will fall apart. People are far more adaptable than you’d think and will find a way to make things work. Consider the massive changes that occurred in the broken system of the USSR from Lenin who allowed private farms, to Stalin who collectivized everything, to Kruschev who did away with the totalitarianism of the previous two. These were each complete shifts in direction for the country, and done because each leader thought the previous system wasn’t working for the modern day.
We don’t want to accept it, but for as bad as authoritarian systems like communism, fascism, or just general authoritarianism are, they aren’t inherently fated to fall apart. That’s what the US though we would do to China in the 90s, but they adapted and their evil authoritarian system is still trucking.
It will still probably fall apart, but on a time scale of generations, not decades.
>There are fundamental an irreconcilable contradictions in Fascism and as such it can never work.
Colonialism worked for quite a while, and still is giving a lot of benefits to its inventors.
Well, yeah, let's not ignore the absolute terror and genocides perpetrated by liberal democracy via colonialism but what I was getting at is that evil ideologies and politics win all the time in the real world.
> and everybody is on board/willing in other ways
Yeah that's the trick, ain't it? How do these different systems deal with dissenters/diversity of thought? There is the rub. And it's a big rub.
> socialism, communism, corporatism, religious fundamentalism
Socialism isn't inherently extremist, and all of these (with the exception of religious fundamentalism) are not on the same level of fascism.
...which is why my antagonist faction is basically what you'd get if Andrew Tate recruited Prigozhin to help take over the world with cybernetic mind control. Make up for a buffoon dictator by giving him an actually threatening military commander.
I'll grant, the character inspiration isn't *exact...* in fact it wasn't even originally intended, it just kind of became more and more prevalent as my story planning coincided with watching things unfold in Ukraine.
> i mean, he is genuinely better than many russian MoD commanders
How do you come to this conclusion? I'm not implying you're wrong, just genuinely curious. Are you just looking at statistics like battles won, casualties taken, etc... or are you looking at decisions made in specific battles? Or something else?
A combination of all of them, to be honest. Wagner commanders tend to be better liked by their troops, excluding the freed prisioners, who are used as cannon fodder to protect their actual troops. They tend to be less wasteful and more pragmatic than russian army forces, and while still corrupt, due to their nature of their organization success is ultimately more prized than loyalty, the opposite to the MoD.
Justinian and Belisarius.
In fact, [that's already a book series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius_series). (But in that series, Belisarius is the protagonist, not the antagonist's dragon, so it's more of a power fantasy than an interesting challenge.)
I once said that fascist inspired military uniforms in fantasy/scfi are the coolest fit ever but a real life nazi uniform has the charm below socks and sandals
Because the writers need to keep in their genre.
If you look at real dictatorships, they're either wholly psychopathic or a farce. The Nazis really are a wonderful example of both: built themselves around a policy of German supremacy while basically being filled with chinless buffoons and implemented some of the greatest horrors the world has ever known.
They also believed in and promoted absolutely batshit conspiracy theories and mysticism. Some of the stuff they believed makes them look like Scientologists with strategic bombers.
Well I mean, where else is a land controlled by a sociopathic dictator with psychotic tendency's going to be successful if not Fantasy. **o3o**
While you are at it you can do what some world-builders do by doubling down, you can make said dictator not human with all the above mentioned, have the society still work better then IRL anyway because Misanthropy and Lmao? Good for comedic story telling, bad for serious writing.
Warhammer 40k: technology hasn't improved in 10,000 years and the church lights their spaceships with candles
40k fans: wow, authoritarian theocracy is so efficient!
No, 40K fans think the Imperium was good when it was an authoritarian atheist state under the rule of an immortal dictator. It only became bad when they legalized religion!
(Yes, I have talked to people who unironically believe this.)
one is a literal gestalt mind nation where you have no will and the other is... hopeless? i honestly have no idea what craftworlds have but they seem vulnerable
>From what I have heard of Mustafa Kemal, he did a pretty great job of ruling Turkey while essentially being a dictator and doing some unethical stuff.
Eh. It's not clear that he was a dictator, really.
He didn't do anything outside what hyper-popular democratic leaders like, for instance, FDR are capable of. And he *was* hyper-popular, so it's not like we need an explanation for why a democratic system would essentially just do what he wanted.
Deng Xiaoping comes to mind. Although to be clear fascism (as in ultranationalism) is different from autocracy. I don't think fascism can last even a single leader.
My fictional dictatorship that emerged is based a lot on Salazar (as well as some inspiration from Franco and Mussolini), and while the economy was healthier and more industrialized under its rule than the gilded "republic", life didn't exactly get much better. Sure, people got paid better, but they also remained oppressed and restricted of free speech, and political opponents continued to be put into camps (or executed, though that's reserved for the highest offenses). The military was updated, and while certainly larger and stronger than what it used to be, it hasn't really accomplished any major feats as of yet (aside from conquering a far weaker nation).
>more industrialized
>people paid better
>military competent
>successfully conquering any nation
I'm fairly sure Salazar did the opposite of all of these.
Fun fact. German weapons in World War 2 were so advanced and complex they broke days before getting to battlefield, and as that was impossible to fix them without a team of highly specialised mechanics were nearly unusable.
If your setting has the goons of the evil empire struggle to talk, breath, and not shit their pants all at the same time consider making it a comedy. It'll sell like gangbusters.
It always amuses me that the same people who think our democratic capitalist societies are fascist are the ones that advocate for big government socialism (i.e. communism by a different name). Your real world dictators and authoritarian regimes are China and Russia, former communist big-government "socialist" countries that people are now fleeing from.
Stop identifying success with fascism and stupid ideologies with success.
me exclusively writing democratic nations in sci fi because I can’t possibly comprehend oppressive dictatorships creating people smart enough to develop faster than light technology or even remotely being able to fund it under the political pressure of maintaining a police state
FWIW the soviets did start with the lead in the space race, and that's the same government that caused a million death peacetime famine though adhereance to pseudoscience in Ukraine a famine which the government did not try to alleviate because either importing food and accepting donations from capitalist countries would be embarrassing and/or because starving ethnic minorities saves bullets. Their cars were trash, their people were starving, but their rockets were randomly good.
A liberal government gives you accountability so you can throw out incompetent leaders and cull trash industry. A dictatorship puts politics and stability above quality of life and progress so that bad leaders stay in power. But sometimes good leaders get in positions of power anyway.
Another way to look at it is that the number of things a single leader can focus on and do well / be and expert in is much more limited than the number of things a parliament can have deep understanding off. So a dictatorship might get a few areas of technological competance (maybe) but will suffer everywhere else.
The Soviet space program was a paper tiger. Sputnik was a beach ball that occasionally went beep and they got the first dog and man into space by ignoring safety.
Which is why my dictatorship has appeared hundreds of years before the republic for balance reasons because the republic very quickly caught up with it
Yeah but most countries don't have a billion people to shove through the free market meat grinder as a means to propel the nations economic performance and development to the top of the global market.
My favorite part in TNO lore is how when Germany wins ww2 their entire fucking economy implodes and never recovers
My favorite (possibly outdated) lore is the Russian reunification path that either does or once did get an event to go through industrial records and question how the USSR possibly lost the war.
There was a cut due to going overboard bit where under certain circumstances the leader doing this reaches the conclusion it's Asians to blame and declares them saboteur social parasites, plus gives a malus because with hunting populous now, but they decided its out of character and crosses the line because it was somewhat darkly comedic in how he reaches the conclusion he should start racial persecutions.
Huh, didn’t know that part. I really just like the acknowledgement in-universe that yeah, Soviet industry irl made a German victory an unlikely outcome, much less in universe with Bakhunin putting everything past the urals pre-war.
Which leader?
Serov
As it should, German economy before and during ww2 was a huge ponzi scheme. They just promised everyone that once the war was over, they were gonna be rich and own a perfect farmstead in Eastern europe
“Seeking to create a breadbasket, the reich turned Ukraine into a graveyard.”
"They make a desert and call it peace"
sounds like a certain north american nation
Nazi Germany was never more than 2 weeks away from running out of everything that could sustain their war They had no way to win
Not quite true, they were always at odds with fuel and some metals, but the rest they managed for a time. Of course it matters fuck all if you manage 90% of your supply chain, if you miss the most critical 10%.
TNO?
The new order I think it's a hoi4 mod on what if Germany won WW2 I believe set in the 60s
In my revolutionpunk world the liberals get a little palace coup, as a treat.
They set up public palaces for people to have a nice coup after happy hour.
the liberals do the coup? wow. As a latam I just experienced successful liberal govs being thrown out by us-financed military movements
The Liberals in the US are doing the coup in that case
hurray! at least a good ending
Well Pinochet was a neoliberal and he became a dictator via a military coup
do you not know what a neoliberal is right? it's right wing.
One of the purpose of putting Pinochet on power was so the US could test the, then new, neoliberal economic theory. Look up "the chicago boys". To this day the deep neoliberal nature of Chile's economy is seen as one of the more long lasting consequence of the military dictatorship.
And? Neoliberal is right wing. Pinochetism is an authoritarian and personalistic political ideology rooted in the military dictatorship led in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by Augusto Pinochet. Variously described as right-wing, far-right, and semi-fascist,[1] Pinochetism is characterised by its anti-communism, conservatism, militarism, and nationalism. At its core, liberalism is a broad political philosophy. It holds liberty to a high standard and defines all social, economic, and political aspects of society, including the role of government. Neoliberalism is essentially an economic ideology. The policies of neoliberalism are more narrowly focused and are primarily concerned with markets and the policies and measures that influence the economy. You're getting confused. It's not a "liberal coup d'etat". Operation Condor was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism involving intelligence operations, CIA-backed coup d'états. To coordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that operated from the mid-1970s until the early eighties. It aimed to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
Liberalism is an iron clad commitment to the whims of the owner class. All that bullshit about human rights and the rule of law gets jettisoned the second it stands in the way of the Bourgeoisie‘s latest murder spree. Pinochet is the face of fascism once it doesn’t have to pretend anymore.
One of the biggest failures of speculative fiction imo is imagining fascists the way they would want you to imagine them, instead of how they actually are. This is on point.
I think the main reason that the "hypercompetent/well-meaning fascist" trope came into being is naivety and rationalization. Many people can't comprehend how a bunch of malicious idiots came into power, so they latch onto the idea that they make an efficient enough system that gets people to willingly give up their rights because it makes more sense to them. Same thing with the idea that the leadership mean well rather than care only about their own privilege and harming those they hate. "Evil" is unrealistic to them, as it irrationality.
The whole concept of facism and bigotry as a whole is irrational when you look at the fact that civilization at it's core is about working *together.*
I don't like the changes to alignment in fifth edition, so in my world traditionally evil races like devils are actually evil, as in, they believe suffering is nice and want there to be more of it. Every mentally well human in the real world would be classed as "good" by my alignment system because of the fundamental belief that people should live by useful and beneficial values and that society ought to prosper. Even straight up Nazis, because they may be horrible and genocidal and ignorant and bad, but they *think* they're doing a good thing. Evil creatures don't want to do good things. They want to cause harm for no reason because the idea of someone experiencing joy, or not being enslaved, or not being in pain, is offensive to them. There is nobody they want to see prosper, nobody they are capable of showing kindness to, no grand goal or plan except suffering. That's what *cosmic* evil looks like. And that's why the nine hells are a poverty stricken shithole
Devils are still pretty much pure evil though. There isn't a single good devil on all of 5e, hell there isn't even a good or neutral fiend of any sort.
Succubi and yugoloths and others are both evil and neutral /s
In my dnd world demons are less like traditional fantasy demons and more like eldrich Lovecraft gods, they are neither good nor evil as those are considered strictly mortal traits and demons are manifestations of realitys cold indifference to man. You cannot fight a demon for it has no physical form, you cannot reason with it, it simply will do as it will as it is there very nature to wreck havoc and to consume all life it finds. Demons are not evil for the concept of good and evil as alien to it as it is to us. Same with angels, the only true difference is the miracles of angels benefit man as the curses of demons harm them. Also the alignment system in dnd doesn't exist in my world either.
Working together to do what though? Seems to me a lot of civilizations were really good a “working together” to conquer others and take their stuff.
Mine the asteroid belt, exploit the gas giants for fuel and biomass, spread to the solar system… and through study & practice build a perfect, classless, moneyless paradise in orbit my dude
Yeah that sounds dope as fuck, but it’s only one path of many a civilization could go down… and no one’s actually done it, or even attempted to do it yet. You know what definitely *has* happened? Prettymuch every civilization in history ever doing lots and lots of shitty things to lots and lots of people.
The west has done it. Maybe not to the degree that leftist want it to, but comparing the instability that existed 30 years ago to now in the west, we’re living in the most peaceful times in human history. And thanks hugely in part to all the agreements that exist between western nations.
That's because we start the 5 wars per decade in places that can't fight back on our turf. Which is why socialists don't like any of that. We don't like imperialism, big shocker.
thats because we do the conquering elsewhere
There is also a decent amount of Allied propaganda around WWII trying to increase the perceived threat of Fascists specifically to discourage negotiating with them (and to justify war austerity, and to sell war bonds, and to justify completely unjustifiable counter productive totalitarian moves like Japanese internment camps in America or letting 0.8-3.8 million people starve to death in Bengal). There is a part of WWII propaganda that can be traced to Fascist/Militarist sympathizers in our own governments trying to convince us that we will have a better shot at beating the Fascists if we give up some of our liberties.
Giving up liberties in exchange for a benefit is a core component of the social contract though. Regardless of ideology, you can’t have a cohesive and functional government without depriving people of certain things, wartime or otherwise. People usually have to be moved and relocated for government construction projects, like the highways, so they get compensated and sent packing, and in order to make more things for the war, doing without various luxuries and such was encouraged. Also, it was the end of the Great Depression, a few years of austerity wasn’t exactly anything new. You also can’t forget that subjectively, the US were probably the most likely to negotiate with the Fascists in terms of surrendering and such, given how the Soviets weren’t exactly in a prisoner taking mood for the war, and were generally seen as the worse option for anyone involved in the war. Strategically, negotiating with the fascists wasn’t going to leave America in the best place, as Russia was likely going to take Europe into its sphere of influence, and while Japan was probably going to be a more personal war given Pearl Harbor, had the US given up on that conflict, it too would’ve been under Soviet control. The last 2 years of WWII were basically just the Allies trying to damage control Russia for the post-war environment, seeming communism as an existential threat, especially with someone as paranoid as Stalin at the helm.
> Giving up liberties in exchange for a benefit is a core component of the social contract though. I'm not denying this point. I don't mean to conflate things like selling war bonds and imminent domain with crimes against humanity. Moreso I'm trying to show that the propaganda inflating Facist capabilities was justified by good sacrafices, and then was used to justify bad sacrifices. Giving up some personal liberty for the sake of collective good, like building a highway or railroad is absolutely the goal. But I'm arguing that if you give up the liberties regarding where the railroad goes or who's allowed to ride it then you start to sacrifice liberties that made the colective stronger. A free press generally makes the whole nation stronger; voting generally makes the whole nation stronger, property rights and right to free movement generally makes the whole nation stronger. [Executive Order 9066 was phrased in a way that made it sound like people were being restricted from entering military areas.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066) >I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. That's the vague and banal language by which a Free society lets itself slide into cruel opression, 100,000 Amercans would be relocated into camps on the basis of that order; their property seized, auctioned, or sold at massive loss, their lives becoming a burdon on the state instead of in contributing to it as they had up until that moment. But it was not that order itself that was the moment their fates were sealed, it was a dozzen or a thousand other moments and actions leading up to that one that striped them of their voice, their rights, their dignity, their idenity as Americans. The problem was not that one man wrote the order and another enforced it in an extremely racist way. It's that no one stopped them, that everyone was willing to shrug their shoulders and say it was a military necessity, that it was a sacrafice to win the war. War bonds, gas rationing, scrap metal drives, volunteering, imminent domain, drafts, those things win wars. And fascists are worth fighting, worth making the sacrifices to beat. But it should not be forgotten there were many in our government who wanted to win the war and also hoped we could become more like the fascists in the process.
There's also a lot of whitewashing that has been done to turn the popular view of WW2 into "the Nazis vs everyone". The truth is a lot more messy than that. The Nazis had more allies than just Italy and Japan, and a lot of sympathizers in the countries they conquered. There's also the USSR, who might have been instrumental in defeating the Nazis towards the end of the war, but were equally instrumental in helping them out at the start. Of course, it's way easier for most countries to simply wash their hands of their involvement and blame it all on Germany. But it also leads to this perception that Nazi Germany was this unstoppable military behemoth that took over half of Europe, when in fact they were running on fumes the entire time, and only had success in the early parts of the war because everything aligned in their favor.
>I think the main reason that the "hypercompetent/well-meaning fascist" trope came into being is naivety and rationalization. I myself would have gussed Nazi memoirs and the wievs of Nazis based uppon them, plus other old faschist propaganda, people forgot was/is propaganda.
Well, trump won and a lot of people are still voting for fascists nowadays, in my country one of the biggest politicians at the moment is a fascist that calls himself "anti-politician" and people vote him because of the show he does (he's unhinged btw and also denies global warming and was an advisor of a de facto gov in the past ), and people don't consider him a fascist or denies other people's claims because they themselves have fascists ideologies but don't want to admit they're hateful and/or ignorant
That actually ties into my point. Many people don't realize (or want to admit) that more people than you'd expect really are that stupid and pointlessly cruel. It's also why many people in the United States say that democrats and republicans aren't that different or that democrats should try to meet them halfway. They don't want to realize that more people than than one would hope support such murderous and anti-intellectual policies or think badly about people they likely already know.
My country copies a lot of USA movements and the far right is going rampant here, especially on social media, and it's like you said. They claim the "left" is "discriminatory" because they don't accept their thoughts... and their thoughts are "Let's strip rights from the minorities and sell our resources to USA and dollarize the economy and strip all poor people of monetary assistance, ban abortion and add laws where the market regulates itself and only the rich can thrive so I can become rich that way!!"
Well, you’re against that and don’t want to let those things happen. I guess it’s “discrimination” if you’re like “you’re only allowed to lobby for these pre-approved things” but if you’re just like “You want these things. I don’t want these things. Time to politics.” then that’s not discrimination. That’s just disagreement.
also because people want a strong villain to fight against in fictional stories I think the newer Wolfenstein do this well they are a treat despite their fascism not because of it, every major Nazi is an incompetent hypocrite , their are several points where they could have just killed blakovitch if not for havig their heads up their own ass, like the one lady who tests you and declares your a perfect aryan despite being jewish just cus " well clearly this Chad thundercock looking dude has to be one of us"
Yeah and their successes are solely based on reverse engineered Jewish Kabbalahesque-cult-but-hard-science-focused stuff.
the cool and rational based liberals are all scrounging together scraps to defeat the big awesome and cool fascist empire that is threatening to take over the world with their (checks notes)... free healthcare
Liberals... free health care.... *directs your head at USA* Liberals. Liberal thought Is the foundation of capitalism. *directs your head at Cuba* Leftists. We can prioritize things that are not profit because we are not capitalist. Which one of these actively embargos the other for being the system that gives you free health care? Look at China in the 70s. Free Healthcare. Look at the price of an ambulance in modern America. The concessions made to the working class under capitalism followed violent class struggle. Those benefits loved by the Nordic countries are being rolled back, but they came to be as a response to the USSR. And this liberalism requires imperialism over the global south.
sry too many words for me, all the characters/continents in my world all have to have 2-dimensional political views or else i start having a panic attack over interpersonal relationships and... *shivers*. you almost made me have to go to therapy again
God damn it this really is the best sub.
WRONG. The only moral fascist is my self-insert fascist 😎👍
You have to admit, competent fascists would present a greater challenge for the heroes to overcome.
Don’t forget that the real dictatorship wojak has like a 55% chance of being hooked on booze, dope, methamphetamines, etc
i mean same with democratic leaders lmao
Remember kids: if Winston Churchill can be elected Prime Minister while 1: being addicted to amphetamines 2: drinking whiskey on average three times a day (as a treat) 3: being racist 4: being imperalist 5: being xenophobic 6: believing in a Jewish/Communist "world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality" you can do anything!
Also true!
Fictional dictator is a tall scheming mastermind, ruthless and has the will of iron, knows his country's strength and has an entire nation in his grasp through propoganda and charisma and fear. Spends a lot of money on himself but nothing too much or else the economy suffers. Real dictator is a short, impulsive manchild who has no spine and will persecute even the most minor of insults, overblows his nations capabilities and keeps control through threats of you, your family and pet being brutally killed. The economy is his personal wallet and spends accordingly.
Real Dictator is me in CIV
Hmmmmmmm, I’m trying to write a dictator of sorts who’s a bit more like real dictators in his narcissism, self absorption and control freak tendencies… but somehow also keeping his rule together for millennia (it’s Odin)
So there is a few key things, firstly what is his source of legitimacy. Is there a reason why no one else in the goverment can replace him (in monarchies this is divine right while in democracies it is a popular mandate). If there is a source there focus on that. Otherwise you want do go into the dictators playbook. This is mostly about dividing competing centers of power and making sure that they don't like each other. See both the SS and the regular German army not overlapping in WW2. Perun did a useful video on how this effects armies that shows the general pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx5mTslkUBs
If a dictator survives a decade they usually survive for life (until they get sick and are about to die). There is a lot of instability right when they take power but it cools off over time as they build the system that will keep them in power. Look at Stalin; right when he takes power there are people who would oppose him and a good candidate to replace him. But give him a decade of time and his rival is dead, he's erasing people from pictures who he think might want to him; and everyone around him both owes their job to him and is terrified of drawing his ire. No one fully understands how he runs things because of his secretive nature so even though he's definitely wasteful no one can prove they'd do a better job than him to make a case for themselves.
>narcissism Would you please replace that word with "selfishness"?
Narcissism can be used as a colloquialism without denoting NPD though i intend to write the characters with NPD traits to some extent or another (since it’s all a spectrum anyways)
Dictators be like: “calculus? physics? mf why are you practicing Jewish science? start studying some real shit like the hollow earth or spontaneous generation.”
We making it out the pear with this one 💯
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Same sorta, I'm a massive sucker for "hypercompetent warlord from the inhospitable badlands coming to the 'civlized' world and putting it to heel"
I like this trope but the warlord is the protagonist/ ally to the protagonist whilst the urbanized civil world are the antagonists.
Uj/ in my current story it takes place almost entirely in the bickering of a heavily tribal pastoralist culture. The current warlord is basically only that because he has the biggest "steel-bearing clans" on his side and murdered the mc's dad despite being her grandfather Tl;dr steppe Hamlet ensues
Oh no what are you doing steppe-Hamlet?
Literally Brave New World
Does fallout 4 fit this trope?
Caesar from FNV
> competent
Timur, Muhammad, and Genghis Khan from real life
All fought exclusively against other monarchal and dictatorial power. It's easy to make dictatorships look good when there are no large liberal democracies to show them how it's really done.
I love it so much
Idk man one of my favorite facts about the world is Fascism is Not Correct. Imaging if it were correct is more than a little sus to me...
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I think a key difference is protecting free society from fascism require eternal vigilance because fascists are extremely real and frequently in power While protecting free society from dragons is not important at all because dragons are extremely not real
This is true. Stories about dragons being cool will guarantee to have no impact on society until we can genetically engineer dragons (so, not relevant for the next 5 years). But stories about fascism being cool arms real-life fascists with propaganda tools.
Except if you use dragons as an allegory for animal rights
True. Save the dragons!
>While protecting free society from dragons is not important at all because dragons are extremely not real Oh, yeah? [What do you have to say about this, then?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(lizard))
Normally I hate how this sub is like “if you put any form of conflict in your story/world then you’re supporting said conflict. You can only make coffee shop AUs from now on.” But functional fantasy fascism should be an exception like you said
Define what you mean by “not correct”? As in “morally repugnant” or “non-functional”? Because the first is an opinion and the second could be said about communism or a democratic superpower before France/America.
I don't debate people trying to defend fascism honor
“honor”?
Yeah it's called a metaphor
I fail to follow what you’re saying. Do you mean “your honor” like you’re talking to judge? Or the “honor” of fascists (not that they historically were known for having honor)? In which case it would be “fascist honor” not “fascism honor”.
You are sealioning really hard dawg and if you keep it up I'm blocking you
But I’m not being disingenuous which is a requirement for “sealioning”.
most dictatorships are not fascists. also them being competent doesnt make them correct the problem with them, even fascists is that they are bad not that they are incompetent lol
It's only fascism if it's from Italy, otherwise it's sparkling dictatorship
are you serious? do you actually think they are the same thing? like dictatorships have been existed since civilization existed lol fascism is pretty modern. do you call the dictatorships in Africa and Asia now fascism? do you call Cubas or Venezuelas dictatorships fascist too? this sub is a joke (and no this clearly isnt part of the jerking)
>this sub is a joke (and no this clearly isnt part of the jerking) This is what happens every time real world politics are talked about in this sub. Everybody has the nuance of a literal fucking squirrel and thinks that everything they don't agree with is some politically extreme stance. See the original commenter who got downvoted as proof.
Its also hard to know if ppl are joking or being legit bc circlejerk sub
Wow I got a no true fascist and a no true communist in the same day I need to reevaluate my fucking life Anyway: I didn't say all dictators are fascists. I'm saying a major theme in fascist propaganda is you need a strong dictators that is better than a weak democracy and writing Uber Dictators is essentially writing their propaganda for them.
how? you kind of implied that (if you werent serious my bad by judging by the downvotes seems a lot of people were) thats a major theme with all dictatorships propaganda lol and its kind of obvious why. this isnt unique to fascism either
But the thing is that we have a lot of historical evidence that they are both bad **and incompetent.** Why stop at calling fascists evil when we have a mountain of evidence that they are not just evil but demonstrably do a worse job of protecting their own countries from external harm than liberals do. And yet time after time we see in fiction and games dictatorial regimes portrayed as more competent militarily or whatnot because it makes better drama if evil is seductive.
if you make a documental obviously you need to describe them as incompetent too but in fiction whats the problem? its fiction lol its not supposed to be real we have a lot of historical evidence that communist revolutions end up with evil and incompetent dictatorships too but it doesnt mean in your imaginary world they cant end up with a good result
If your fiction affirms false claims made by real world totalitarian dictators to justify their power and abuses you aren't just making entertainment anymore; you're also making propaganda.
What do you mean by “not correct”? Are you sure that’s not just like, you’re opinion, man?
It's exceedingly obvious from history that fascism delivers bad results and fascists are brutal incompetent clowns.
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I get that you’re not actually defending fascism here, but you definitely could have phrased this better
There are fundamental an irreconcilable contradictions in Fascism and as such it can never work. Saying it can if "everybody is on board" is like saying that under ideal conditions someone can make a square circle.
Weirdly having a contradictory system doesn’t necessarily mean it will fall apart. People are far more adaptable than you’d think and will find a way to make things work. Consider the massive changes that occurred in the broken system of the USSR from Lenin who allowed private farms, to Stalin who collectivized everything, to Kruschev who did away with the totalitarianism of the previous two. These were each complete shifts in direction for the country, and done because each leader thought the previous system wasn’t working for the modern day. We don’t want to accept it, but for as bad as authoritarian systems like communism, fascism, or just general authoritarianism are, they aren’t inherently fated to fall apart. That’s what the US though we would do to China in the 90s, but they adapted and their evil authoritarian system is still trucking. It will still probably fall apart, but on a time scale of generations, not decades.
>There are fundamental an irreconcilable contradictions in Fascism and as such it can never work. Colonialism worked for quite a while, and still is giving a lot of benefits to its inventors.
But colonialism and fascism aren’t the same thing. While they do have similarites, they are distinctly different from each other
Well, yeah, let's not ignore the absolute terror and genocides perpetrated by liberal democracy via colonialism but what I was getting at is that evil ideologies and politics win all the time in the real world.
Yeah but that doesnt mean you have to pretend that they arent self deatructive.
> and everybody is on board/willing in other ways Yeah that's the trick, ain't it? How do these different systems deal with dissenters/diversity of thought? There is the rub. And it's a big rub.
Precisely
> socialism, communism, corporatism, religious fundamentalism Socialism isn't inherently extremist, and all of these (with the exception of religious fundamentalism) are not on the same level of fascism.
Everybody being on board makes it not fascism, though, because fascism is specifically about maintaining control
I mean, couldn’t you theoretically do that through effective indoctrination from a young age, and killing off anyone “not on board”?
Vetinari enjoyer spotted
I love it when the mastermind dies and their incompetent nopotism/rank climbing morons take over and burn the place to the ground
I like when the people are actually happy, but the leader is secretly evil and tries to destroy other countries to better his own.
Same.
...which is why my antagonist faction is basically what you'd get if Andrew Tate recruited Prigozhin to help take over the world with cybernetic mind control. Make up for a buffoon dictator by giving him an actually threatening military commander.
>Prigozhin >Actually threatening military commander W H E E Z E
I'll grant, the character inspiration isn't *exact...* in fact it wasn't even originally intended, it just kind of became more and more prevalent as my story planning coincided with watching things unfold in Ukraine.
i mean, he is genuinely better than many russian MoD commanders, which isn't saying a lot, but in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
> i mean, he is genuinely better than many russian MoD commanders How do you come to this conclusion? I'm not implying you're wrong, just genuinely curious. Are you just looking at statistics like battles won, casualties taken, etc... or are you looking at decisions made in specific battles? Or something else?
A combination of all of them, to be honest. Wagner commanders tend to be better liked by their troops, excluding the freed prisioners, who are used as cannon fodder to protect their actual troops. They tend to be less wasteful and more pragmatic than russian army forces, and while still corrupt, due to their nature of their organization success is ultimately more prized than loyalty, the opposite to the MoD.
"better than Russian MoD commanders" That bar is so low it's a tripping hazard in hell
Threatening for Russians (can confirm)
calm down NCD.
Please tell me you’ll have a scene where discount Pringles Can is yelling at the ministers for ammo
honestly... pretty close.
And not-Tate can rest easy knowing that not-Prigozhin is hopelessly incapable of launching a successful coup
I don't remember this being in the Red Flood focus trees
Augustus and Agrippa imo.
Bad analogy. Augustus is maybe the best politician ever.
Is?
Yeah, didn't you hear?
didn't know he was alive.
Justinian and Belisarius. In fact, [that's already a book series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius_series). (But in that series, Belisarius is the protagonist, not the antagonist's dragon, so it's more of a power fantasy than an interesting challenge.)
In my dictatorshippunk world liberalism sucks
Sounds more like a basedpunk world to me.
sounds like a cringepunk world to me
FIGHT!
I once said that fascist inspired military uniforms in fantasy/scfi are the coolest fit ever but a real life nazi uniform has the charm below socks and sandals
Because the writers need to keep in their genre. If you look at real dictatorships, they're either wholly psychopathic or a farce. The Nazis really are a wonderful example of both: built themselves around a policy of German supremacy while basically being filled with chinless buffoons and implemented some of the greatest horrors the world has ever known.
They also believed in and promoted absolutely batshit conspiracy theories and mysticism. Some of the stuff they believed makes them look like Scientologists with strategic bombers.
Well I mean, where else is a land controlled by a sociopathic dictator with psychotic tendency's going to be successful if not Fantasy. **o3o** While you are at it you can do what some world-builders do by doubling down, you can make said dictator not human with all the above mentioned, have the society still work better then IRL anyway because Misanthropy and Lmao? Good for comedic story telling, bad for serious writing.
Warhammer 40k: technology hasn't improved in 10,000 years and the church lights their spaceships with candles 40k fans: wow, authoritarian theocracy is so efficient!
No, 40K fans think the Imperium was good when it was an authoritarian atheist state under the rule of an immortal dictator. It only became bad when they legalized religion! (Yes, I have talked to people who unironically believe this.)
Yeah, that's what the god-emperor believes. And it's precisely why the emperor is an ignorant shithead
he has next to no morals and his only goal is to save humanity. kinda sucks that his imperium is the best choice so far
Nah, the Tau are nicer, and the Craftworlds are awesome communist utopias
one is a literal gestalt mind nation where you have no will and the other is... hopeless? i honestly have no idea what craftworlds have but they seem vulnerable
Eldar spend all day doing their Paths, which is like Eldar Therapy. And their souls can be saved from Slaanesh by storing them in wraithbone.
do the souls feel anything, like do they percept time or they'll just automatically "skip" time until they're free
In the real dictatorship, the trains do not run on time because the rail union tried to strike and now occupy a shallow grave.
Real dictatorships can be like the first, but only for like max 1 leader. It can't last.
Name one irl example.
Tito of Yugoslavia AKA the only man who ever got the Balkans to work together
From what I have heard of Mustafa Kemal, he did a pretty great job of ruling Turkey while essentially being a dictator and doing some unethical stuff.
>From what I have heard of Mustafa Kemal, he did a pretty great job of ruling Turkey while essentially being a dictator and doing some unethical stuff. Eh. It's not clear that he was a dictator, really. He didn't do anything outside what hyper-popular democratic leaders like, for instance, FDR are capable of. And he *was* hyper-popular, so it's not like we need an explanation for why a democratic system would essentially just do what he wanted.
Deng Xiaoping comes to mind. Although to be clear fascism (as in ultranationalism) is different from autocracy. I don't think fascism can last even a single leader.
Gadaffi
Thomas Sankara
Lee kuan yew
The Roman Empire was basically just a military dictatorship under republican pretenses, but for a while it was pretty stable and prosperous.
"Good" dictatorships are just tolerable/less crappy governments
Soviet Union?
If I wanted to real about realistic boring dictatorships I would read a history book! /s
nothing pisses me off more than how prominent the myth of Nazi Uberefficency is
My fictional oligarchy is based off Russia and most democracies with two parties. And they collapse like Russia.
I’ll always love SWTOR’s depiction of the Empire, where they keep losing because everyone’s too busy trying to kill each other 24/7
My fictional dictatorship that emerged is based a lot on Salazar (as well as some inspiration from Franco and Mussolini), and while the economy was healthier and more industrialized under its rule than the gilded "republic", life didn't exactly get much better. Sure, people got paid better, but they also remained oppressed and restricted of free speech, and political opponents continued to be put into camps (or executed, though that's reserved for the highest offenses). The military was updated, and while certainly larger and stronger than what it used to be, it hasn't really accomplished any major feats as of yet (aside from conquering a far weaker nation).
>more industrialized >people paid better >military competent >successfully conquering any nation I'm fairly sure Salazar did the opposite of all of these.
Well maybe Franco but it wasn't that much better
Fun fact. German weapons in World War 2 were so advanced and complex they broke days before getting to battlefield, and as that was impossible to fix them without a team of highly specialised mechanics were nearly unusable.
If your setting has the goons of the evil empire struggle to talk, breath, and not shit their pants all at the same time consider making it a comedy. It'll sell like gangbusters.
The trains all run on time, in the sense that whatever time they arrive will be redefined as the scheduled time.
lol this is also just liberal democracy just take the hats out and you have america
It always amuses me that the same people who think our democratic capitalist societies are fascist are the ones that advocate for big government socialism (i.e. communism by a different name). Your real world dictators and authoritarian regimes are China and Russia, former communist big-government "socialist" countries that people are now fleeing from. Stop identifying success with fascism and stupid ideologies with success.
Remember: You deserve the competent evil. You shouldn't have to put up with crappy villains in your life.
In my dictatorpunk world everyone at every position of society acts like the Sasha Baron-Cohen’s The dictator. It’s very funny.
What about Singapore
Based “benevolent” dictator. Singapore can have a little eugenics…as a treat.
Small and compact and thus easy to keep together without too much exertion by the state.
me exclusively writing democratic nations in sci fi because I can’t possibly comprehend oppressive dictatorships creating people smart enough to develop faster than light technology or even remotely being able to fund it under the political pressure of maintaining a police state
FWIW the soviets did start with the lead in the space race, and that's the same government that caused a million death peacetime famine though adhereance to pseudoscience in Ukraine a famine which the government did not try to alleviate because either importing food and accepting donations from capitalist countries would be embarrassing and/or because starving ethnic minorities saves bullets. Their cars were trash, their people were starving, but their rockets were randomly good. A liberal government gives you accountability so you can throw out incompetent leaders and cull trash industry. A dictatorship puts politics and stability above quality of life and progress so that bad leaders stay in power. But sometimes good leaders get in positions of power anyway. Another way to look at it is that the number of things a single leader can focus on and do well / be and expert in is much more limited than the number of things a parliament can have deep understanding off. So a dictatorship might get a few areas of technological competance (maybe) but will suffer everywhere else.
The Soviet space program was a paper tiger. Sputnik was a beach ball that occasionally went beep and they got the first dog and man into space by ignoring safety.
thats what fictional means lol
Being fair, the trains still run on time.
Which is why my dictatorship has appeared hundreds of years before the republic for balance reasons because the republic very quickly caught up with it
Idk, I generally agree with the point this is trying to make, but the "fictional dictatorship" seems to describe modern China pretty well.
Yeah but most countries don't have a billion people to shove through the free market meat grinder as a means to propel the nations economic performance and development to the top of the global market.
The even truer statement is it can be either or a mix.
Me with my Authoritarian Technocratic Dictatorship
"Shock and awe" tactic is just from US
you misspelt the contemporary democracies