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OK, here it is...

It is the year 1953, and war threatens between the two great superpowers, the Confederate States of America, which extends from California to Chile and only extends the right to vote to about 1/6 of its heavily policed population, and the German Union, a German-run megastate dominating much of Europe and whose major political parties only disagreement on genocide is “how much is too much?” Their allies, the British Empire, which only occasionally massacres its colonial subjects, and the reborn Spanish Empire will be dragged, willy-nilly, into the struggle, and two hemispheres will run red with blood and various colors with ickier fluids. Meanwhile, the US, now firmly under the leadership of a “Populist” party gone mostly fascist, plots revenge…
This is the world of “Bring the Jubilee”, Ward Moore’s early and influential alternate history, in which Lee wins at Gettysburg and the Confederates then go on to kick an absurd amount of ass. In the next half-century the Confederacy would drive relentlessly south and swallow up most of Latin America, enserfing the population when they fought back or reducing them to second-class citizenship if they didn’t. In the meantime, Germany would unite under rather different circumstances than in our world, leading to the replacement of the relatively small-c conservative consensus of our world by a radical German nationalism that would have made Hitler beam with glee. These things fed on each other: the Confederacy’s success in subjugating half a continent and relegation of all those not descended from “original Confederates” to various forms of limited citizenship or outright subjugation shaped German ideas on how to deal with troublesome populations; the German use of calculated, scientific atrocity helped the CSA and others develop better methods of control and imperial rule.

The United States, crippled by reparations and territorial losses, underwent what can best be described as a total emotional collapse, turning in on itself and against anyone who was “different”, against Jews, against foreigners, against abolitionists and blacks for provoking the war, against Republicans for losing the war and Democrats for siding in such numbers with the enemy. Hyperinflation did unto the middle class what it did to Germans in the 1920s. The US for a while seemed to be on the point of breaking up further, and Canada and the CSA looked on with interest.

A new stability – a sad, sullen, bankrupt one – eventually reemerged. The New Whigs emerged from the shadows to “return sense to the nation.” They were soon challenged by the initially rather weak Populists, representing the (mostly) poor farmers, laborers, etc.

As if some bizarre, diabolical author of events were controlling things, the USA took an extraordinarily self-destructive path over the first few decades, first cutting off all immigration and then, as if thinking “hm. No. We have not done enough to cripple ourselves” went on to more extreme measures. In a situation of widespread poverty in which people would normally compete for the lowest wages, instead a form of indenture counterintuitively became almost universally popular with business, with government support, until what was a form of corporate slavery, with all its inconveniences for both servant and master, became the norm in the USA east of the Mississippi. In a grotesque imitation of the situation in the OTL south, anyone not indentured was at danger of being arrested for vagrancy and put to work on a chain gang. And while hardship made marriages late compared to earlier, and the flow of immigration was cut off, and more and more migrated abroad, the government decided that many of the problems of the economy were due to too many people chasing too few jobs, and began various programs to persuade the populace to have even less children. Compulsory education was eliminated, for if there’s one thing a country in a deep hole doesn’t need, it’s an educated population, while what colleges remained were purged of anyone not sticking to advocating the most conservative, reactionary and, most of all, government-approved ideas. As a result of the inflationary period, people are terrified of debt, [1] credit rare to nonexistent, and things are paid for up front, with cash, in spite of what works fine in every other modern state on earth, although major mercantile concerns in the major cities appear to be finally ridding themselves of a bizarrely persistent superstition nearly eighty years old.

Suffrage is male-only in most of the US states, although the still-polygamous Mormons have the vote for women, as does Oregon. Highway robbery was a common feature of life throughout much of the country, and local militias are still bringing it under control in the 50s, while the national army was essentially a joke: the government couldn’t raise the money to get a better, while the foreign powers which controlled much of the economy wouldn’t have let them build one anyone – especially not the Confederates.

The economy by the 1940s was firmly third-world, in the sense of a nation completely open to the imports and products of other nations, but little to export save raw materials, with most of its industry in foreign hands. Some local wealth – and there always is some – had managed to use their connections to the foreign money tree to start developing some local industries and business, but as yet these shoots of US production were largely unnoticed by the larger public, to whom it appeared the country was headed for eventual collapse.

Things were in some ways better on the west coast, if only because the extremely poor communications with the east coast allowed locals to handle their affairs largely without the meddling of Whig agents (and the ability to send those who did show up tarred and feathered back to Philadelphia with little risk of retaliation), and if Canadian/British and Confederate companies dominated the economy, they at least didn’t do so with the US government acting as their local enforcer. Indenture remained fairly rare, and the Mormons, indeed, ran a pretty tight little ship of a state. Indeed, the (attempted) bringing of the far western states into the political mainstream in the 40s (the long-delayed completion of the transcontinental railway and with it, the final destruction of the wild Indian tribes took place at this time) would be one of the things that would eventually bring down the old system and shoot into power the radical Populist-Redeemer [2] coalition, of which more below…

The Confederacy operates as a complex hierarchy; of the adult membership of its some 300 million inhabitants (nearly twice as many as the OTL US at this time), only 1 in 6 have full citizenship rights: the descendants of those who were Confederate citizens in 1867. Below them are what one calls “Subject Confederates” rather than “Citizens”: usually white immigrants and light-skinned, loyal Latinos, they possess most of the rights of citizens but cannot vote or run for office above the level of, say, village dog-catcher. Children of male Citizens and Subject women are Citizens: marriages of female Citizens and Subject men are not illegal, but very seriously frowned upon and rare.

Subjects can become citizens for "great service to the nation", but this is granted rarely enough that unless you're a bad enough dude to rescue the President from Ninjas, it's best to just grease the palms of a few major Confederate politicians (six figures, Confederate dollars, should about do it).

Below them are blacks, darker-skinned Hispanics and Hispanics of dubious loyalty but no actual crimes on their blotter, who make up the “Freedman” class. They labor under various legal disabilities Subject Confederates do not, often are trapped in labor contracts only slightly less onerous than US indenture, and although much less likely to suffer random assault than blacks in the USA, certain transgressions – such as touching a white woman, Subject Confederate or Citizen – still usually bring swift and usually lethal retribution. Blacks usually try to emigrate to Haiti or the less awful parts of the British Empire, at worst to Liberia or Sierra Leone – they are rather likelier than US blacks to be able to afford to, but it’s a lot harder to get an exit visa from the CSA than the USA, if you are a member of the laboring classes.

Below them are the various forms of un-free non-citizens: people under debt bondage, peonage, temporary enslavement for crimes or rebellion - mostly rebellious Hispanics, Mestizo or otherwise, and moderately troublesome Indian tribes (seriously troublesome Indian tribes soon cease to trouble, and fertilize instead). Occasionally a Subject Confederate gets into trouble badly enough for temporary enslavement, but for reasons of social decorum white forced labor works separately from non-white.

It is of course a police state. Citizens are almost universally armed, surveillance is as extensive as is possible in a mostly pre-electronics world, and ID and proper papers are always required to be handy. Much of the work of keeping the bottom layers down is done by Subject Confederates of European descent rather than Citizens, given that they are fairly trusted – with few other options in a Europe increasingly unpleasant for anyone who is not “Nordic” enough, many Europeans are happy to move to a place where they can prosper and live in peace even if they can’t vote – Confederate Citizens are usually not too sniffy towards Subject Confederates (it helps there are comparatively few poor, resentful Confederates. The Confederacy has a decent social safety net – the funds for it sweated out of the slaves and semi-free, of course, not from the rich.)

The Confederacy, like most modern states in 1953 – another way in which this world is a strange mix of the modern and reactionary - has universal female suffrage (well, for Citizen women, anyway). It is also a heavily industrialized state, the limits of a sweated-labor economy have not yet been reached simply due to the backwardness of the general setting. Like Stalin’s USSR, it is the epitome of a heavy-industrial 19th century economy – the fact that this world is only sluggishly moving out of the 19th century as of 1953 means that the problems with this are not immediately apparent.

Haiti survives thanks to the Dominican Republic joining the new Spanish Empire (“hang together or the CSA eats us”), which means that an invasion of Haiti will get Spain and the Empire mad – and the Germans, not very friend-rich, will back Spain. That shaky balance has lasted so far – but with Armageddon looming, Haitians wonder how long it will remain safe. Haiti, thanks in part to a continual flow of talented freemen from the USA and CSA, has done better in this world, and has merely South American levels of crapitude rather than sub-Saharan African.

The British Empire is unhappy with its alliance with the brutal assclowns of the CSA (as they refer to them in private), but with the German behemoth lurking across the channel there’s not much they can do without some muscle on their side. If the CSA is run by assclowns, Germany is run by high-functioning sociopaths – what happened to the Jews is proof of that. The British Empire is not too different than OTL, although there are more people in Australia than OTL 1953 (it’s sufficiently far away from the probable major theaters of conflict for people to feel safer there). It’s run a bit more ruthlessly than OTL – the continued success of Brutal Nations has made people more accepting, or at least more indifferent, to force applied in the name of stability. (Gandhi would have mysteriously disappeared and ended up in an unidentified grave fairly early in his Indian career in this world). It is none the less the most democratic and most tolerant of the major powers – they’ve even given the Jews their own Dominion in Africa (perhaps partly in guilt over not accepting more of them into Britain proper when they were being massacred), although they still tend to be left off party invitation lists.

The New Spanish empire is an odd, still somewhat unstable organism, a bit uncoordinated in its various parts. It looks back proudly to its former glories, but somewhat uncertainly to the future. Spain has had a better 90 years than it had by OTLs 1953, and is currently a constitutional if still somewhat authoritarian monarchy with a rapidly growing economy fueled by the farming economies of the southern cone and Cuba and by growing Iberian industrialization. The Cubans are rather unhappy about the way the other members of the Empire tend to look at them as a bunch of n-words, but find it more tolerable than the enslavement of the majority of their population that would not doubt occur if the CSA were to take over. The Spaniards aren’t quite as icked out by the Germans as the British, but it’s not so much a matter of liking the Germans as hating the CSA and the subjection of their Hispanic brethren. (German investment in Spain is also rather important for their economy).

The German Union (they don’t use the word “Empire” because it’s not _organic_ enough, and it’s old-fashioned) either puppetizes or directly controls almost everything between the Pyrennes and the Urals. It is a radical state, racially based, “scientific” in a superficial way, and really quite unhappy about how little of the globe it has been able to take over so far and that those Confederates over there seem to be amused. (Do I AMUSE you? I make you LAUGH? ) The system is still highly efficient and industrial production remains high, although ideological weirdness has had some destructive impacts on the educational system, and people are scared to speak their minds when they contradict the views of the Party Coalition that has controlled things since the war (an amalgation of the far right, the further right, and the barking mad wears clown makeup and fights a guy dressed as a bat right wing parties). The racial hierarchy is in some ways more flexible than the Confederate system, and some ethnicities (Hungarians, Balts) are pretty much honorary Germans, but others really need to Germanize or die (the Polish language is well on the way to extinction): fortunately the current consensus isn’t as biologically extreme as OTLs Third Reich, and (most, anyway) Slavs are considered capable of Germanization, although some on the Furthest Right continue to gibber on about Aryans and the Hidden Sub-Races and Vril and so on.

The Japanese Meiji Restoration ended up a dud thanks to butterflies, and the Shoguns still rule Japan, and Samurai still bear swords: not being idiots, the Shoguns have pushed modernization hard in their own ways, carving out a modest little empire in the east aided by the collapse of Russia, and if the Samurai have the swords the Shoguns conscripts have semi-automatic weapons. Women still do not have the vote, but the Japanese educational system is among the finest in the world, and there is more open intellectual inquiry nowadays in Tokyo than in Berlin or Confederate Washington. (Well, intellectual inquiry about anything but politics, anyway. Attempts to turn the Shogun into a figurehead recently brought a revival of the good old practice of nailing enemies of the ruler to crosses, much to the consternation of the Christian community.)

Jewish Uganda-Eretz worries about the possibility of German invasion from Somalia in case of a war. Well, let them come then: this will be a far harder Masada to take, and Uganda-Eretz is heavily armed enough to pile up an awful lot of German corpses.

(It is not a good world for Jews: first the German government’s insane declaration of a “national emergency” brought about by “foreign Jewish elements”, the faked-up charges, the Pogroms, finally the madness of the Blood Years, the German “grass-roots” Purity Squads, the flight into Russian territory that turned out to be no escape, facing immigration quotas in the CSA and England, the Second Diaspora…few countries welcome them, although the British have been accommodating in Africa, as have been the Boers and the latest Japanese Shogun, who understands the loyalty of those with no options, while the Ottomans have been more accepting of immigration since they lost Syria, and with it the Holy Land).

The Ottomans are very unhappy that their ally against Russian “aggression” back when has come to see them as a dusky-skinned embarrassment; when the Empire’s Arab population, primed with British guns and gold (the forced Turkization? Couldn’t have been that) exploded into rebellion, the Germans not only did not help, but having sent troops into Syria to protect their national interests, decided to take a chunk for themselves. If Germany had a back, Turkey would now be closely inspecting it for places to insert a knife.

China managed to avoid a full-blown warlord era (and by doing so convinced the Japanese that trying to vassalize them would be way too much trouble) and under a still somewhat shaky new dynasty are slowly modernizing, aided in earlier years by a sort of Japanese “Monroe Doctrine” that like OTLs Open Door policy stands against any carveup of China into colonial spheres: the Japanese are uncomfortable enough with the Europeans in SE Asia and the islands. There has been some talk lately of a Japanese-Chinese alliance in a world where the two great powers are two white nations who generally agree that all dusky-skinned (or epicanthic-eye-folded) peoples should tug the forelock and bend the knee, but suspicions and old resentments remain strong, and if the war that everyone sees coming goes on long enough, maybe both of the western giants will be crippled as a result…

Technological progress has been slow in this world, the US education system being crippled, the German one perverted with ideology, the CSA one aimed for a tiny elite, and the British – well, perhaps they were all too busy playing cricket? In any event, as of 1953 nobody has invented heavier than air flying machines, automobiles run on steam, and wireless radio transmission is a closely guarded German military secret. Gas is only just now being replaced by electrical public lighting in New York, although to be fair New York is usually a generation or so behind Washington or London. People’s personalities are still being “scientifically” judged by the shape of their chins or the lobes of their ears.

Zeppelins and other dirigible-type flyers are abundant, of course.

Mass production has not been hampered, though: by the 1920s steam-powered cars or “minibiles” were common enough in the CSA and the German Union as to no longer be just the province of the rich, and were almost universal for the middle and upper classes by the 50s; while Germany and the CSA built railroad networks even more densely than the US and Germany of our world, the CSA having built seven transcontinental railroads and a branch line to Rio by 1930 (some might argue that including the lines running across Mexico and Central America were sort of cheating, given the rather shortened distance involved) and would build a Patagonia-California highway by 1953, burning down and paving the jungles that OTL stopped the wimpy Pan-American highway at Panama.

Indeed, some truly grand engineering feats have taken place, from the dual CSA canals in Central America to the building of undersea train tunnels both by the French and British as a joint project, and by the Japanese as a solo project to link Japan to their mainland possession of Korea. Chemistry and chemical synthesis are not so backward either: you can get a very nice cup of synthetic never-seen-a-bean coffee in some places, and chemists boast that given time, they’ll be able to make steak out of wood and silk out of sand (wooden steak, alas, tastes terrible). Fine, high-quality engineering exists, and some of the stuff done with clockwork is practically clockpunk in it's complexity and fineness. Psychiatry (locally “Emotional Pathology”) has avoided the weird neuroses of Freud and is actually doing people some good. And while nobody can build a decent vacuum tube, quantum physics is in some ways more developed than it was in the 30s OTL.

(Technological development in some cases has been so schizoid in some cases that one might suspect a form of contagious insanity, perhaps originating in the USA: decades after it became possible to develop a teletype system based on keystrokes and letters, people continued to use Morse code to send messages across wires. In clear defiance of any basic knowledge of aerodynamics, in spite of countless deaths and failures, people kept trying to master steering a balloon with sails for decades.)

Movies (“tinugraphs”) now in vivid, even lurid, color are almost as developed as OTL (“talkies” were invented only a few years after our timeline) and remains a huge industry with nothing resembling TV on the horizon: the CSA of course has the biggest and best studios on the planet.

In 1953, the world is on the brink. Germany is building an alarmingly large navy, which from the British point of view can have only one real purpose. The Confederacy has been building up forces in Chile and Brazil, which from the Spanish point of view, can have only one real purpose. The Confederacy claims the Spanish Empire is stirring up rebellion among its Hispanic subjects and freedmen. And a crisis boils in the USA, where a violent party split in the Populists, the rebellion of the West against efforts of the Party establishment in the east to “bring them in line”, and a near-collapse of popular support for the Whigs, in the wake of revelations showing (or possibly seeming to show) just how much in the pocket of foreign interests they were (“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people who were known to the heads of the Whig Party to be in the pay of Confederate agents and are still working in the highest levels of government”) brought the country to the point of revolution, not aided by a Confederate military incursion to “restore order” in riot-torn Brooklyn when local forces seemed unable or unwilling to do so. The political arm of the anti-Confederate Grand Army, the Redeemer party, an illegal nonentity a decade ago, now has a sizeable chunk of Congress, and a Radical Populist holds the White House: the Whigs hold enough votes still to block any actual change if they get the moderate Populists to bundle with them, but there are signs of wavering as people burn their indenture cards, and sometimes the contract holders as well. And as Confederate and British officials talk about a full-scale intervention to “restore freedom” to the US, the news arrives that members of the German military have arrived in Philadelphia for high-level talks…

[1] In spite of the fact that inflation is usually worse for creditors than debtors. Honestly, it’s like this reality was created by someone ignorant of economics or something.

[2] The political arm of the paramilitary Grand Army of the Republic.

Description
OK, here it is...

It is the year 1953, and war threatens between the two great superpowers, the Confederate States of America, which extends from California to Chile and only extends the right to vote to about 1/6 of its heavily policed population, and the German Union, a German-run megastate dominating much of Europe and whose major political parties only disagreement on genocide is “how much is too much?” Their allies, the British Empire, which only occasionally massacres its colonial subjects, and the reborn Spanish Empire will be dragged, willy-nilly, into the struggle, and two hemispheres will run red with blood and various colors with ickier fluids. Meanwhile, the US, now firmly under the leadership of a “Populist” party gone mostly fascist, plots revenge…
This is the world of “Bring the Jubilee”, Ward Moore’s early and influential alternate history, in which Lee wins at Gettysburg and the Confederates then go on to kick an absurd amount of ass. In the next half-century the Confederacy would drive relentlessly south and swallow up most of Latin America, enserfing the population when they fought back or reducing them to second-class citizenship if they didn’t. In the meantime, Germany would unite under rather different circumstances than in our world, leading to the replacement of the relatively small-c conservative consensus of our world by a radical German nationalism that would have made Hitler beam with glee. These things fed on each other: the Confederacy’s success in subjugating half a continent and relegation of all those not descended from “original Confederates” to various forms of limited citizenship or outright subjugation shaped German ideas on how to deal with troublesome populations; the German use of calculated, scientific atrocity helped the CSA and others develop better methods of control and imperial rule.

The United States, crippled by reparations and territorial losses, underwent what can best be described as a total emotional collapse, turning in on itself and against anyone who was “different”, against Jews, against foreigners, against abolitionists and blacks for provoking the war, against Republicans for losing the war and Democrats for siding in such numbers with the enemy. Hyperinflation did unto the middle class what it did to Germans in the 1920s. The US for a while seemed to be on the point of breaking up further, and Canada and the CSA looked on with interest.

A new stability – a sad, sullen, bankrupt one – eventually reemerged. The New Whigs emerged from the shadows to “return sense to the nation.” They were soon challenged by the initially rather weak Populists, representing the (mostly) poor farmers, laborers, etc.

As if some bizarre, diabolical author of events were controlling things, the USA took an extraordinarily self-destructive path over the first few decades, first cutting off all immigration and then, as if thinking “hm. No. We have not done enough to cripple ourselves” went on to more extreme measures. In a situation of widespread poverty in which people would normally compete for the lowest wages, instead a form of indenture counterintuitively became almost universally popular with business, with government support, until what was a form of corporate slavery, with all its inconveniences for both servant and master, became the norm in the USA east of the Mississippi. In a grotesque imitation of the situation in the OTL south, anyone not indentured was at danger of being arrested for vagrancy and put to work on a chain gang. And while hardship made marriages late compared to earlier, and the flow of immigration was cut off, and more and more migrated abroad, the government decided that many of the problems of the economy were due to too many people chasing too few jobs, and began various programs to persuade the populace to have even less children. Compulsory education was eliminated, for if there’s one thing a country in a deep hole doesn’t need, it’s an educated population, while what colleges remained were purged of anyone not sticking to advocating the most conservative, reactionary and, most of all, government-approved ideas. As a result of the inflationary period, people are terrified of debt, [1] credit rare to nonexistent, and things are paid for up front, with cash, in spite of what works fine in every other modern state on earth, although major mercantile concerns in the major cities appear to be finally ridding themselves of a bizarrely persistent superstition nearly eighty years old.

Suffrage is male-only in most of the US states, although the still-polygamous Mormons have the vote for women, as does Oregon. Highway robbery was a common feature of life throughout much of the country, and local militias are still bringing it under control in the 50s, while the national army was essentially a joke: the government couldn’t raise the money to get a better, while the foreign powers which controlled much of the economy wouldn’t have let them build one anyone – especially not the Confederates.

The economy by the 1940s was firmly third-world, in the sense of a nation completely open to the imports and products of other nations, but little to export save raw materials, with most of its industry in foreign hands. Some local wealth – and there always is some – had managed to use their connections to the foreign money tree to start developing some local industries and business, but as yet these shoots of US production were largely unnoticed by the larger public, to whom it appeared the country was headed for eventual collapse.

Things were in some ways better on the west coast, if only because the extremely poor communications with the east coast allowed locals to handle their affairs largely without the meddling of Whig agents (and the ability to send those who did show up tarred and feathered back to Philadelphia with little risk of retaliation), and if Canadian/British and Confederate companies dominated the economy, they at least didn’t do so with the US government acting as their local enforcer. Indenture remained fairly rare, and the Mormons, indeed, ran a pretty tight little ship of a state. Indeed, the (attempted) bringing of the far western states into the political mainstream in the 40s (the long-delayed completion of the transcontinental railway and with it, the final destruction of the wild Indian tribes took place at this time) would be one of the things that would eventually bring down the old system and shoot into power the radical Populist-Redeemer [2] coalition, of which more below…

The Confederacy operates as a complex hierarchy; of the adult membership of its some 300 million inhabitants (nearly twice as many as the OTL US at this time), only 1 in 6 have full citizenship rights: the descendants of those who were Confederate citizens in 1867. Below them are what one calls “Subject Confederates” rather than “Citizens”: usually white immigrants and light-skinned, loyal Latinos, they possess most of the rights of citizens but cannot vote or run for office above the level of, say, village dog-catcher. Children of male Citizens and Subject women are Citizens: marriages of female Citizens and Subject men are not illegal, but very seriously frowned upon and rare.

Subjects can become citizens for "great service to the nation", but this is granted rarely enough that unless you're a bad enough dude to rescue the President from Ninjas, it's best to just grease the palms of a few major Confederate politicians (six figures, Confederate dollars, should about do it).

Below them are blacks, darker-skinned Hispanics and Hispanics of dubious loyalty but no actual crimes on their blotter, who make up the “Freedman” class. They labor under various legal disabilities Subject Confederates do not, often are trapped in labor contracts only slightly less onerous than US indenture, and although much less likely to suffer random assault than blacks in the USA, certain transgressions – such as touching a white woman, Subject Confederate or Citizen – still usually bring swift and usually lethal retribution. Blacks usually try to emigrate to Haiti or the less awful parts of the British Empire, at worst to Liberia or Sierra Leone – they are rather likelier than US blacks to be able to afford to, but it’s a lot harder to get an exit visa from the CSA than the USA, if you are a member of the laboring classes.

Below them are the various forms of un-free non-citizens: people under debt bondage, peonage, temporary enslavement for crimes or rebellion - mostly rebellious Hispanics, Mestizo or otherwise, and moderately troublesome Indian tribes (seriously troublesome Indian tribes soon cease to trouble, and fertilize instead). Occasionally a Subject Confederate gets into trouble badly enough for temporary enslavement, but for reasons of social decorum white forced labor works separately from non-white.

It is of course a police state. Citizens are almost universally armed, surveillance is as extensive as is possible in a mostly pre-electronics world, and ID and proper papers are always required to be handy. Much of the work of keeping the bottom layers down is done by Subject Confederates of European descent rather than Citizens, given that they are fairly trusted – with few other options in a Europe increasingly unpleasant for anyone who is not “Nordic” enough, many Europeans are happy to move to a place where they can prosper and live in peace even if they can’t vote – Confederate Citizens are usually not too sniffy towards Subject Confederates (it helps there are comparatively few poor, resentful Confederates. The Confederacy has a decent social safety net – the funds for it sweated out of the slaves and semi-free, of course, not from the rich.)

The Confederacy, like most modern states in 1953 – another way in which this world is a strange mix of the modern and reactionary - has universal female suffrage (well, for Citizen women, anyway). It is also a heavily industrialized state, the limits of a sweated-labor economy have not yet been reached simply due to the backwardness of the general setting. Like Stalin’s USSR, it is the epitome of a heavy-industrial 19th century economy – the fact that this world is only sluggishly moving out of the 19th century as of 1953 means that the problems with this are not immediately apparent.

Haiti survives thanks to the Dominican Republic joining the new Spanish Empire (“hang together or the CSA eats us”), which means that an invasion of Haiti will get Spain and the Empire mad – and the Germans, not very friend-rich, will back Spain. That shaky balance has lasted so far – but with Armageddon looming, Haitians wonder how long it will remain safe. Haiti, thanks in part to a continual flow of talented freemen from the USA and CSA, has done better in this world, and has merely South American levels of crapitude rather than sub-Saharan African.

The British Empire is unhappy with its alliance with the brutal assclowns of the CSA (as they refer to them in private), but with the German behemoth lurking across the channel there’s not much they can do without some muscle on their side. If the CSA is run by assclowns, Germany is run by high-functioning sociopaths – what happened to the Jews is proof of that. The British Empire is not too different than OTL, although there are more people in Australia than OTL 1953 (it’s sufficiently far away from the probable major theaters of conflict for people to feel safer there). It’s run a bit more ruthlessly than OTL – the continued success of Brutal Nations has made people more accepting, or at least more indifferent, to force applied in the name of stability. (Gandhi would have mysteriously disappeared and ended up in an unidentified grave fairly early in his Indian career in this world). It is none the less the most democratic and most tolerant of the major powers – they’ve even given the Jews their own Dominion in Africa (perhaps partly in guilt over not accepting more of them into Britain proper when they were being massacred), although they still tend to be left off party invitation lists.

The New Spanish empire is an odd, still somewhat unstable organism, a bit uncoordinated in its various parts. It looks back proudly to its former glories, but somewhat uncertainly to the future. Spain has had a better 90 years than it had by OTLs 1953, and is currently a constitutional if still somewhat authoritarian monarchy with a rapidly growing economy fueled by the farming economies of the southern cone and Cuba and by growing Iberian industrialization. The Cubans are rather unhappy about the way the other members of the Empire tend to look at them as a bunch of n-words, but find it more tolerable than the enslavement of the majority of their population that would not doubt occur if the CSA were to take over. The Spaniards aren’t quite as icked out by the Germans as the British, but it’s not so much a matter of liking the Germans as hating the CSA and the subjection of their Hispanic brethren. (German investment in Spain is also rather important for their economy).

The German Union (they don’t use the word “Empire” because it’s not _organic_ enough, and it’s old-fashioned) either puppetizes or directly controls almost everything between the Pyrennes and the Urals. It is a radical state, racially based, “scientific” in a superficial way, and really quite unhappy about how little of the globe it has been able to take over so far and that those Confederates over there seem to be amused. (Do I AMUSE you? I make you LAUGH? ) The system is still highly efficient and industrial production remains high, although ideological weirdness has had some destructive impacts on the educational system, and people are scared to speak their minds when they contradict the views of the Party Coalition that has controlled things since the war (an amalgation of the far right, the further right, and the barking mad wears clown makeup and fights a guy dressed as a bat right wing parties). The racial hierarchy is in some ways more flexible than the Confederate system, and some ethnicities (Hungarians, Balts) are pretty much honorary Germans, but others really need to Germanize or die (the Polish language is well on the way to extinction): fortunately the current consensus isn’t as biologically extreme as OTLs Third Reich, and (most, anyway) Slavs are considered capable of Germanization, although some on the Furthest Right continue to gibber on about Aryans and the Hidden Sub-Races and Vril and so on.

The Japanese Meiji Restoration ended up a dud thanks to butterflies, and the Shoguns still rule Japan, and Samurai still bear swords: not being idiots, the Shoguns have pushed modernization hard in their own ways, carving out a modest little empire in the east aided by the collapse of Russia, and if the Samurai have the swords the Shoguns conscripts have semi-automatic weapons. Women still do not have the vote, but the Japanese educational system is among the finest in the world, and there is more open intellectual inquiry nowadays in Tokyo than in Berlin or Confederate Washington. (Well, intellectual inquiry about anything but politics, anyway. Attempts to turn the Shogun into a figurehead recently brought a revival of the good old practice of nailing enemies of the ruler to crosses, much to the consternation of the Christian community.)

Jewish Uganda-Eretz worries about the possibility of German invasion from Somalia in case of a war. Well, let them come then: this will be a far harder Masada to take, and Uganda-Eretz is heavily armed enough to pile up an awful lot of German corpses.

(It is not a good world for Jews: first the German government’s insane declaration of a “national emergency” brought about by “foreign Jewish elements”, the faked-up charges, the Pogroms, finally the madness of the Blood Years, the German “grass-roots” Purity Squads, the flight into Russian territory that turned out to be no escape, facing immigration quotas in the CSA and England, the Second Diaspora…few countries welcome them, although the British have been accommodating in Africa, as have been the Boers and the latest Japanese Shogun, who understands the loyalty of those with no options, while the Ottomans have been more accepting of immigration since they lost Syria, and with it the Holy Land).

The Ottomans are very unhappy that their ally against Russian “aggression” back when has come to see them as a dusky-skinned embarrassment; when the Empire’s Arab population, primed with British guns and gold (the forced Turkization? Couldn’t have been that) exploded into rebellion, the Germans not only did not help, but having sent troops into Syria to protect their national interests, decided to take a chunk for themselves. If Germany had a back, Turkey would now be closely inspecting it for places to insert a knife.

China managed to avoid a full-blown warlord era (and by doing so convinced the Japanese that trying to vassalize them would be way too much trouble) and under a still somewhat shaky new dynasty are slowly modernizing, aided in earlier years by a sort of Japanese “Monroe Doctrine” that like OTLs Open Door policy stands against any carveup of China into colonial spheres: the Japanese are uncomfortable enough with the Europeans in SE Asia and the islands. There has been some talk lately of a Japanese-Chinese alliance in a world where the two great powers are two white nations who generally agree that all dusky-skinned (or epicanthic-eye-folded) peoples should tug the forelock and bend the knee, but suspicions and old resentments remain strong, and if the war that everyone sees coming goes on long enough, maybe both of the western giants will be crippled as a result…

Technological progress has been slow in this world, the US education system being crippled, the German one perverted with ideology, the CSA one aimed for a tiny elite, and the British – well, perhaps they were all too busy playing cricket? In any event, as of 1953 nobody has invented heavier than air flying machines, automobiles run on steam, and wireless radio transmission is a closely guarded German military secret. Gas is only just now being replaced by electrical public lighting in New York, although to be fair New York is usually a generation or so behind Washington or London. People’s personalities are still being “scientifically” judged by the shape of their chins or the lobes of their ears.

Zeppelins and other dirigible-type flyers are abundant, of course.

Mass production has not been hampered, though: by the 1920s steam-powered cars or “minibiles” were common enough in the CSA and the German Union as to no longer be just the province of the rich, and were almost universal for the middle and upper classes by the 50s; while Germany and the CSA built railroad networks even more densely than the US and Germany of our world, the CSA having built seven transcontinental railroads and a branch line to Rio by 1930 (some might argue that including the lines running across Mexico and Central America were sort of cheating, given the rather shortened distance involved) and would build a Patagonia-California highway by 1953, burning down and paving the jungles that OTL stopped the wimpy Pan-American highway at Panama.

Indeed, some truly grand engineering feats have taken place, from the dual CSA canals in Central America to the building of undersea train tunnels both by the French and British as a joint project, and by the Japanese as a solo project to link Japan to their mainland possession of Korea. Chemistry and chemical synthesis are not so backward either: you can get a very nice cup of synthetic never-seen-a-bean coffee in some places, and chemists boast that given time, they’ll be able to make steak out of wood and silk out of sand (wooden steak, alas, tastes terrible). Fine, high-quality engineering exists, and some of the stuff done with clockwork is practically clockpunk in it's complexity and fineness. Psychiatry (locally “Emotional Pathology”) has avoided the weird neuroses of Freud and is actually doing people some good. And while nobody can build a decent vacuum tube, quantum physics is in some ways more developed than it was in the 30s OTL.

(Technological development in some cases has been so schizoid in some cases that one might suspect a form of contagious insanity, perhaps originating in the USA: decades after it became possible to develop a teletype system based on keystrokes and letters, people continued to use Morse code to send messages across wires. In clear defiance of any basic knowledge of aerodynamics, in spite of countless deaths and failures, people kept trying to master steering a balloon with sails for decades.)

Movies (“tinugraphs”) now in vivid, even lurid, color are almost as developed as OTL (“talkies” were invented only a few years after our timeline) and remains a huge industry with nothing resembling TV on the horizon: the CSA of course has the biggest and best studios on the planet.

In 1953, the world is on the brink. Germany is building an alarmingly large navy, which from the British point of view can have only one real purpose. The Confederacy has been building up forces in Chile and Brazil, which from the Spanish point of view, can have only one real purpose. The Confederacy claims the Spanish Empire is stirring up rebellion among its Hispanic subjects and freedmen. And a crisis boils in the USA, where a violent party split in the Populists, the rebellion of the West against efforts of the Party establishment in the east to “bring them in line”, and a near-collapse of popular support for the Whigs, in the wake of revelations showing (or possibly seeming to show) just how much in the pocket of foreign interests they were (“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people who were known to the heads of the Whig Party to be in the pay of Confederate agents and are still working in the highest levels of government”) brought the country to the point of revolution, not aided by a Confederate military incursion to “restore order” in riot-torn Brooklyn when local forces seemed unable or unwilling to do so. The political arm of the anti-Confederate Grand Army, the Redeemer party, an illegal nonentity a decade ago, now has a sizeable chunk of Congress, and a Radical Populist holds the White House: the Whigs hold enough votes still to block any actual change if they get the moderate Populists to bundle with them, but there are signs of wavering as people burn their indenture cards, and sometimes the contract holders as well. And as Confederate and British officials talk about a full-scale intervention to “restore freedom” to the US, the news arrives that members of the German military have arrived in Philadelphia for high-level talks…

[1] In spite of the fact that inflation is usually worse for creditors than debtors. Honestly, it’s like this reality was created by someone ignorant of economics or something.

[2] The political arm of the paramilitary Grand Army of the Republic.