Taking it from behind

A reverse-chronological alternative history lacking the triumphs of socialism and political correctness.

1945 – present day.

Imperial Japan surrenders to Allied forces in the far East, the Third Reich lies in ruins and nationalistic fascism is dead forever, thanks to the mass production of armaments by US, Canadian & UK manufacturing businesses and the patriotism of the servicemen and civilians who manned or made the weapons - including the atomic bomb devised by European and Anglosphere scientists.

A victorious Britain turns to the Labour Party to solve the post-war problems of social inequality and the inefficiency of private industry and private medicine.

Meanwhile in Europe comes the early stirrings of a mass popular movement to abolish nationalism by welding the countries of that continent into a single state, and the Western world as a whole moves towards a rational paradise built by replacing education as a domain of the privileged children of the rich and preserving the so-called wisdom of millennia and an archaic search for “objective truth.” Intellectuals and educators are to build a world centred upon addressing social needs such as equality and children’s right to self-esteem above all things.

Many surviving European Jews migrate into the Palestine Mandate in an attempt to evade the British Foreign Office’s decades-long violation of the Balfour Declaration.

Widescale and lethal infection of wounds and injuries become a thing of the past as penicillin and other antibiotics become commercially available and so surgery becomes ever-more invasive and adventurous as survival rates skyrocket.

Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

1937.

The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship prevails upon His Majesty’s Government to cease rearming the Royal Air Force and to divert funds intended for the Spitfire and Hurricane into providing food and shelter for Britain’s homeless and to fund free education and apprenticeships in peaceful trades for the children of the poor.

1933.

In Washington, the United Workers’ Party of America successfully broke Congressional deadlock and in return for supporting President Roosevelt’s New Deal government pushed through legislation that part-nationalised General Motors and the Ford Corporation, along with Boeing and all East Coast and Great Lakes heavy manufacturing facilities, with the specific intention of putting US manufacturing in the hands of peace-loving organisations under the slogan “A home for every American  and a refrigerator in every American home by 1940.” In linked moves Ku Klux Klan Democrats organised a purge of Jewish scientists from America’s scientific and academic establishment and the United States Fellowship of Reconciliation used its moral muscle and from pulpits and in Washington lobbies obliged the weakened Roosevelt Administration to order the arrest and prosecution of Albert Einstein and other atomic scientists as threats to the safety of mankind.

1901.

After earlier than expected electoral successes, the newly-formed Labour Party obliged its more numerous Liberal Party coalition partners to impose a steep and progressive inheritance tax. Alexander Fleming was unable to finance his entry into medical school when his uncle John Fleming died and his bequest was reduced to a pittance.

1865 -1901.

American  industry expands rapidly after the Civil War and the laissez-faire economic policies of many state and federal governments allows the victorious North to industrialize and the East to colonise the Western United States in an unprecedented increase in living standards and urbanisation.

Meanwhile the British open up new markets to exports of ideas and ever more industrial goods to its growing trading empire. Honest, limited and lawful government is made available (often at gunpoint) to continents that has never known it before.
Worldwide communications of ideas and technological civilisation via almost unregulated shipping and the new private telegraph companies (alongside efficient and responsible public postal services) spread the ideas of scientific and personal progress. This was ultimately based upon the value of all human life in an ordered, rational universe created by a single god as taught in the theologies and morals of post-Reformation western Christianity and a freed and prosperous Jewry who bound himself to laws of nature and Divine morality.  

The British Raj banned the practise of burning widows on their husbands’ pyres.

Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

1864, Nebraska Republicans were unable to get the would-be Nevadan State Constitution to the Capitol in time to be ratified to help re-elect Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps if the telegraph system had not been taken into more efficient public ownership to aid the war effort, the US Telegraph Service would have built the transcontinental line earlier and thus allowed them to send their constitution electronically.

George B McLellan, the Democrats’ peace candidate, encouraged by Nevada’s failure, won by a small majority.

An anti-Northern, anti-industry coalition grew up between the former Confederacy and amongst Midwestern farming interests who distrusted the growing East Coast plutocracy during the subsequent years of military stalemate. After the Refederation Congress of 1872, antitrust and agrarian legislation was passed by Democrats and Cross-Aisle Republicans in both Houses. Runaway slaves were repatriated to the booming cotton and tobacco states of the resurgent South.

1833 -1857.

Slave revolts in the Caribbean and independence movements in Canada began to consume the British Government’s military and economic resources. Taxation of the East India Company was doubled and then trebled to support the pacification of Montreal and Jamaica, and the Indian Mutiny ends with British interests limited thereafter to some minor ports and unsuccessful evangelist missions around Calcutta.

1787.

The Enlightenment conquered all! Under the Secularism Bill of 1786, all reference to religion in the House of Commons was forbidden. Any involvement between church groups and political candidates and the use of theological argument to support public petitioning was banned. The Quakers of The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, along with the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood and the Anglican Evangelicals Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce were prevented from organizing the Abolitionist Movement. Their supporters were prohibited from standing for election to Parliament. The British Empire slave trade continued unabated with North American and Caribbean agriculturalists.

1600 -1865.

North America was colonised by small groups of nonconformist Protestants intending to live in self-governing communities by reliance on laws of their own choosing taken from Reformed Christian theology and separatist ideas discussed in numerous tracts and books available in  Jacobeans Britain.

Later, in Britain the Agricultural Revolution massively increases food production; banishing famine from the British mainland forever and thus allowing a surplus population to grow up to use the new banking system and thus enabling industrialisation to permanently urbanise and eventually to mechanize the country’s production of goods.

Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

1605-8.

In the aftermath of the successful Gunpowder Plot, retuning Catholic exiles and their Jesuit supporters co-opted pastoralist agitators and anti-enclosure rioters to suppress the resurgent of Protestant gentry. Enclosing common land in banned and later reversed “For The Common Weal.”

Parliament passed the Bible Act which not only recriminalized reading the Bible in English but also put all printing presses and under Church control “To Prevent Controversy In Religion And To Uphold Peace Amongst His Catholic Majesty’s Subjects.”

Jews’ exile from the Tudor kingdoms, principalities and Virginia was confirmed by Parliament to be in perpetuity.

1215 – 1369.

The Magana Carta and its sequels and ratifications gradually introduce and confirm in law and politics throughout  Angevin lands the concepts of limited government under laws, public consultation on taxation, speedy trial by a jury of one’s peers and the end to the arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of free men and nobles at the King’s whim.

Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

732.

Under the Treaty of Tours, the Frankish General Charles Martel and the Umayyad Caliphate under Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi agreed “The Understanding of Friendship” which declared a perpetual peace between Christendom and Islam “Forasmuch as both divinely inspired faiths are equal in seeking at all times peace between all nations and princes, just government and the happiness of mankind.”

732 – 1066. Burgundian, French, proto-Norman and later the Anglo-Saxon and Western Celtic kingdoms fell one by one to Umayyad and later Hishamite armies.

27 BC – 1453 AD.

The Roman Empire preserves and extends the Hellenistic culture with its Greek philosophy, mathematics and science; literacy, communications and trade; (often) honest government and eventually under the Judeo-Hellenic religion Christianity introduces the universalist idea of an ordered and lawful universe under a controlling and benevolent god who, like his creation, can be held to account to obey the laws of nature and morality. Thus to treat human beings justly irrespective of nationality, status or expediency is a matter of Divine instruction as well as political convenience.

Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

355 – 1493.

Julian the Apostate restored the Western Roman Empire to its pagan virtue and (almost) its republican austerity. His heirs and successors in the Eastern Empire were similarly successful in banishing the Christian church from political power and eventually from all public life. Internal political divisions resulted in a series of civil wars over Imperial succession and access to revenues generated by state-supported pagan temples lands. Growing class consciousness amongst the nobility led to the unrestrained legal persecution of the poor and thence to large-scale hereditary indebtedness amongst small famers and common townspeople. Depopulation of the Byzantine agricultural heartlands grew ever faster alongside mass desertion from the army and navy. Debtor-led Secessionist movements throughout Anatolia and Thrace forced the Eastern Empire to spend most of its dwindling tax revenues on internal security and coastguard activities against emigration.

The Sassanid Empire conquered the East and established soon-to-be-warring satrapies throughout Anatolia, under which literacy trade and communications gradually declined to pre-Hellenistic levels.

Germanic and Celtic tribes overwhelmed Italy and mainland Greece and a revived Carthage eliminated all Hellenistic culture west of the Rhine. Europe descended into a permanent Dark Age until it was finally depopulated by genocide and turned into grazing grounds by the Mongol Empire by the end of 1285.

The last free family in North America took to the Arctic Ocean in a kayak in 1493 heading for Greenland to escape the sun-god’s priests. (The unconquered and still-powerful Incan Empire that had subjugated the horseless pre-Columbian Native Americans completed its colonisation of the entire Western Continent by July 1776.)

600,000 to 100,000 BC.

Homo Heidelbergensis flourish in Europe and Africa: armed with fire, stone tools and hunting weapons; equipped with language, division of labour in its hunter-gathering plus practising organised religion and arts and crafts; and possessing a much larger brain case than its ancestors thanks to a diet of meat,. After the extinction of Neanderthals in Europe, Heidelbergensis’s descendants in Africa survive all the other of genus homo and the whole human race now alive is ultimately derived from them.

 Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

2,300,000 to 1,400,000 BC, in deference to racial memories of the Great Mother Goddess Lucy: fire was abandoned as being dangerous to children and wildlife alike; the introduction of sophisticated stone tools was delayed until every single member of genus homo could be provided with equal shares of the new technology and taught to use them with equal facility under conditions of absolute safety; hunting expeditions would now be led, not by young males and advised by the group’s wisest elders but instead undertaken by pregnant females under the guidance gleaned from the enriching influence and fresh new perspectives of the troop’s adolescent members. The eating of meat was forbidden as being cruel to animals.

530,000,000 to 490,000,000 BC.

After the end of the Ediacaran Period, oxygen levels and Earth’s temperature increase rapidly, leading to the largest explosion of new life forms in Earth’s history and abundance and variety approaching that of our own modern biosphere.

Life on Earth, previously confined to colonies of simple, soft-bodied marine creatures, spread and changed exponentially. In this period, under increasing warm conditions and influenced by hyper active evolutionary arms races between predator and prey, animals with skeletons rapidly spread and jointed creature such as crustaceans who would one day colonise the surface of the planet spread across the ocean floors.

Fortunately, all of the above did not happen because…

530,000,001 BC, in the primordial soup of the Prime Slime - David Pre-Cambrian - announced measures to: prevent global warming by restricting growth in the world’s dangerous oxygen supply; to restrict evolutionary rearmament to one mutation per geological period; and proposed a worldwide ban on ever, ever growing a spine.